Our web team has compiled some information about technology used for this website on the Information for Webmasters page. This is mainly focused on page content.

For information on how the build process works see docs subfolder

Structure

Most files are XHTML files organised in a rather logical folder structure.

Every website served using this repo has its own folder with the full domain name it is to be served from.

Domains

This repository also contains the source files of other websites the FSFE hosts:

fsfe.org for fsfe.org
activities/android for freeyourandroid.org
activities/ilovefs for ilovefs.org
drm.info for drm.info
pdfreaders.org for pdfreaders.org
test.fsfe.org is fsfe.org built from the test branch of this repository

Important folders

Notable top level directories are:

build: Mostly custom Bash and XSL scripts to build the website
global: Globally used data files and modules, also the static translated strings.
tools: Contains miscellaneous XML, XSL, and SH files.

And of course the different website folders.

And here are dome notable directories inside the folder for the main webpage, fsfe.org.

about: Information about the FSFE itself, its team members etc
activities: All specific FSFE activities
at, de, ee etc: Folders used for the FSFE country teams
cgi-bin: Our very few CGI scripts
error: Custom 4xx and 5xx error pages
events: Files for our events, ordered by year
freesoftware: More timeless pages explaining Free Software and related topics
graphics: Icons, pictures and logos
internal: Forms used mostly by FSFE staff for internal processes
look: CSS and other style files
news: Files for news articles, press releases, and newsletters ordered by year
order: Our web shop
scripts: JavaScript files used on our pages
tags: Files necessary to display used tags throughout the website. Mostly automatically generated

Contribute

Become member of our awesome webmaster team and help to improve our online information platform!

Translate

We adore our voluntary translators who make information about Free Software available over 30 languages, from Arabic to Turkish!

Join them to spread the message of our community in all over Europe and beyond. The translators team page will introduce you to their amazing work.

You can see the current status of translation progress of fsfe.org at status.fsfe.org/translations

Build

There are two ways to build and develop the directory locally. Initial builds of the webpages may take ~40 minutes, but subsequent builds should be much faster. Using the --languages flag to avoid building all supported languages can make this much faster. See ./build/README.md for more information.

Alterations to build scripts or the files used site-wide will result in near full rebuilds.

Native

We can either install the required dependencies manually using our preferred package manager. If you are a nix use one can run nix-shell to enter a shell with the required build dependencies, with the python virtualenv already installed and activated.

If installing manually, the required binary names are

python3 pip

Also needed are the libraries

libxml2 libxslt

Then, we must activate a Python virtual env and install the python dependencies.

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

After getting the dependencies one way or another we can actually build and serve the pages.

The pages can be built and served by running ./build.py. Try --help for more information. The simple web server used lacks the features of apache which used on the FSFE web servers. This is why no index is automatically selected for each directory and other behaviours.

Docker

Simply running docker compose run --service-ports build --serve should build the webpages and make them available over localhost. Some more explanation: we are essentially just using docker as a way to provide dependencies and then running the build script. All flags after build are passed to build.py. The service-ports flag is required to open ports from the container for serving the output, not needed if not using the --serve flag of the build script.

Testing

While most small changes can be tested adequately by building locally some larger changes, particularly ones relating to the order pages, event registration and other forms may require more integrated testing. This can be achieved using the test branch. This branch is built and served in the same way as the main site, fsfe.org. The built version of the test branch may be viewed at test.fsfe.org.

Status Viewing

The status of builds of fsfe.org and test.fsfe.org can be viewed at status.fsfe.org

Languages

HTML 95.7%

JavaScript 1.3%

XSLT 1.1%

Less 0.8%

PHP 0.6%

Other 0.4%

README.md

FSFE Website

Table of Contents

Technical information