How to run the content management system

Basic use

After saving your work within articles/ and lit/, chdir to your documentation root; e.g., the directory where articles/, bin/, lit/, omit/, and site/ exist. Then run:

$ bin/me4.py

There may be some output to indicate the script’s progress. Hopefully there will be no errors. At that point, the website contents will be available under site/.

Using make

My copy of the CMS has a makefile that runs bin/me4.py and bin/sftp-upload-script.

I don’t like SFTP due to its abject lack of practical features, especially for removing directories recursively. So my bin/sftp-upload-script kind of brute-forces its way around that.

Local viewing

Browsers like (in particular) Google Chrome aren’t intended for directly opening resources in the local filesystem. Mozilla Firefox does this a little better, but even then, you’re likely to see a directory listing instead of index.html when you open a topic instead of an article within the topic. Navigating manually to index.html is a workaround, although the address bar will say “index.html”, which is not how the site is supposed to look.

I run a lightweight HTTP server on my desktop system so that I can preview the site via my loopback adapter. I’ve also modified /etc/hosts to give the site an apparent network name.

Making CSS changes visible

I’ve found that when I change the CSS file, Firefox 110 sometimes hangs on to old styling. I used to work around this by clearing all of my browser history, but later I found that clicking “disable cache” in the Inspector (Ctrl-Shift-I) is sufficient. Just be sure to turn caching back on for day-to-day browsing.