Making Amendments with a Markup Language

Page written by David Gibson

Click/Tap a link or scroll on down.

• Introduction • Pages Available for Editing • Procedures • HTML-Like Markup • Expert Editing • Technical Notes

Introduction

In general, the BCRA web pages are not suitable for editing by 'untrained' staff because they have not been designed with that in mind. Thus, unlike blogs, bulletin boards and the like, they use 'raw' HTML code interspersed with PHP scripting, JavaScript and CSS, and would not be comprehensible to non-experts.

I am experimenting with a method of allowing BCRA officers to make small changes to web pages themselves. Some knowledge of coding will still be advantageous, but for small corrections like updates to sentences and paragraphs of text, that might not be necessary. This facility has to be specifically added to each webpage so, for now, it is just on a few pages. The procedures are outlined below.

Pages Available for Editing

At present, this is limited to the pages for BCRA Information, Charity Policies, Biographies of BCRA Trustees

The page Field Meetings Guidelines can also be edited, but follows an earlier implementation of the markup process.

Procedures

To edit a page you need to use a text editor such as Microsoft Word or Textpad. You do not need an HTML editor. In summary, the procedure is

  1. Go to the last 'chapter' on one of the above-listed pages, which is titled Staff Information or something similar.
  2. Click on the link to Download a plain-text version, which will open up a new page containing the markup data.
  3. Select all the text (ctrl-a, ctrl-c) and paste it into your editor.
  4. The text contains an HTML-like markup, as explained below. Make your changes, taking care not to include any incorrect mark-up, as far as you are able.
  5. Email the file to the website editor who will run it through a verification program and then upload it.
  6. In due course you will able to do the verification and uploading exercise yourself. However, there is no point in my writing code to achieve that if the scheme does not have frequent use.

HTML-Like Markup

If you post regularly to BB-style forums, such as the BCRA News Forum or UKcaving.com you might be familiar with BBcode, which is a simplified subset of HTML markup. It should not be a big step to go from using BBcode to being able to read HTML – Im not asking you to write HTML, just to be able to read it with an adaquate level of understanding. The main points to remember are...

There are some rules about the use of characters...

Expert Editing

If you understand HTML, you can use an HTML editor to construct your text. But...

Technical Notes

The HTML pages for which this process is implemented have a chapter at the bottom that explains how to edit them. This comes from the file markup_notes.html and is merged into the HTML using the new_include_div() PHP function from common.php. That requires the name of the data file to be passed manually (without its file extension) as an argument to the function.

The HTML pages incorporate the data file via paste_html() from paste_html.php. The process in paste_html() does ...

then...

then...

This means that ...



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This page, http://bcra.org.uk/detail/markup.html was last modified on Sun, 18 Aug 2024 15:06:44 +0100