WebSite

The Inkscape project welcomes contributions to its website at https://inkscape.org/. Your help is valuable in different areas, and this page provides info to guide you.

We always need editors, translators, testers, designers and developers — and if you think you can help in any of those areas, please contact us by sending a mail to Martin Owens (doctormo@gmail.com).

Editing

We have a small team of people who look after the web site contents, keep it up-to-date and constantly look for ways to improve it, by collecting information from various sources and presenting it on the web site. You can support us in various ways: suggest improvements or corrections, write contents about topics that are missing, write news articles and help with ‘marketing’, or join us long-term and help with contents maintenance.

User Account

Please register an account using your email address and activate the account. Once active and logged in, please email any of the website supervisors such as Martin Owens (doctormo@gmail.com), the inkscape-docs mailing list or the inkscape-translator mailing list to get the necessary permissions.

Your account will then be enabled with the right permissions to add and edit any of the pages on the website. Please take care not to disrupt other content as you edit the website. As before, don't hesitate to ask other website editors on their mailing list if you need help.

If anything goes wrong while you are editing — for example, you encounter a bug, or you accidentally delete something you did not intend to delete, or something weird happens, and you don't know why —, please ask for help on one of the mailing lists — either translators, or inkscape-docs. You can also contact your team admin directly or file a bug report for the website at the bug tracker.

Using the Website Editor

Editors and translators can visit the Inkscape website, log in as themselves and edit and add content to the django content management system (cms). This does not require any code access but does require knowledge of html and staff access plus that you be in the Editors or Translators group to give you all the required permissions.

When you want to edit a page for the first time after the update, you will be asked to agree to publish your work under the website's licence. This will ensure that your work can be built upon by others in a safe manner.

REMEMBER: Your changes are NOT published until you press the publish button on the tool bar!

The toolbar in live mode

The toolbar shown here is made visible by clicking on the top-right arrow sign. From this bar you can turn editing on for any cms page you are visiting and edit the content therein. Ask for help if you get lost editing the various sections of the website.

Editing the inkscape.org website

The screenshot to the right shows a page with the editor mode switched on. As you can see, when your mouse hovers above an editable section of a web page, you are prompted to double-click to edit that page. This allows you to add new content blocks as well as edit existing blocks. Most pages will only have one such section, but the front page has several. If you need a page with a new design that has multiple blocks, please see website development below.

The toolbar after you have saved your changes

The toolbar will indicate when there are changes on a page that can be published. Click on Publish changes to publish your (or another person's) changes, and / or click on View published to leave the edit mode.

To learn how to edit and tweak the front page, you can watch this video on YouTube (note: the video shows how this works on an older version of the website's cms, so icons and toolbar will look different):

Click here to watch the video! (12:36)

Specific Instructions

Add a description of your changes before saving

Creating an internal link	Creating a link to an external page
	Dialog for adding pictures to the website
A TOC plugin in edit mode	An inline TOC (can also be added as a ’sidebar’ on the right)

Texts: When you save a text plugin, you will be asked to fill in a short description of your changes at the bottom of the editor window. This little summary will be used for updating others about your changes.

External tools: If you decide to do your translations using your favourite editor, be sure to use a plain text editor for this. Office suites and other word processing tools that support formatting are unsuitable, because they might add additional formatting automatically, which can accidentally end up on the website and break the actual formatting.

Links: Links on our website are inserted as plugins. This ensures that internal links will automatically be adapted, if the linked page is moved, or does not have a translation for the language where the link is used. They are managed via the web site's database. This is also part of the preparation for a more automated translation system. The downside of this is, that a link can only be used once, and only in the text where it was created. It may not be copied (if you do so, you can cause severe problems for the website).

Images: Images are plugins, too. They, too, cannot be copied directly from one page to the other, unless one chooses ‘Copy all plugins from English’ to make a whole new page. To insert an image (raster images only, svg is not supported by our current plugin), choose ‘Picture’ from the plugin dropdown list and fill in the dialog with the necessary info. Don't forget to add licence and attribution info, if applicable. If you want to use a picture that is already used on a different page (e.g. when editing a translation), download that picture to your computer (use your browser's right-click menu for that) and upload it again using the picture plugin dialog.

TOC: The TOC (Table of Contents) plugin can be inserted into pages with long texts to make navigating them easier for users. It will also add little anchor symbols behind all headings on that page, that other people can directly link to.

Other plugins: The CMS widgets come in a number of types. File and Video widgets do as you would expect and allow you to add those media elements.

Spell Checking: Your browser's spell checker will work when editing text. To change the language or access suggested replacements, hold Ctrl down while right-clicking into the text.

Known Issues

• IMPORTANT: When you click on ‘Publish’ for a page, nothing happens for a few seconds. Only then does the loading animation start. Don't click on ‘Publish’ twice, just wait until it starts by itself. Every click on this will send a mail to all subscribers, and add to the server load. Also, incomplete saves have been seen as a result.
• There's a ‘Create’ button now available in the top left. If you are a translator, you will never need this button. It is for creating new, non-translation pages.
• Copy-pasting any plugins (and changing them after this) will result in the plugin source page (i.e. the English page in most cases) being altered. Never copy plugins! Only copy contents using a detour via a plain text editor.
• Hitting ‘Enter’ while editing a plugin in a pop-up dialog may lose previous page edits.
• Sometimes, the ‘Edit’ button is not available. Then you can still edit the page by going to ‘Page -> Edit this Page’ in the toolbar.
• Sometimes, ‘Publish’ is not available, even if you made changes to some plugins. In this case, go to ‘Page -> Unpublish Page’ in the toolbar, and when it has been unpublished, click on the big blue ‘Publish now’ button to publish.
• If your browser window is not wide enough, some controls on the ‘Pages’ overview in the admin interface (if you have permission to access it) may be missing. You can either try to extend your browser window (even if the left part goes away from your screen; you may use the Responsive Design View of your browser) or zoom out. You may encounter the same problem with the ‘Language’ menu of the toolbar.

Translations

If you are fluent in a language different from English, please consider joining our website translators' team. We strive to make Inkscape accessible for as many people as possible, and internationalization is important to reach this goal.

To translate the CMS contents and the news, you'll need the ability to edit the CMS as explained in the previous part.

Translating CMS contents

Adding a new translation

Adding a translation — Step 1

To add a translation of a page which does not yet exist, navigate to the page in your language and use the ‘Page’ menu to Edit this Page.

Adding a translation — Step 2

Next, click on the Page settings button in the toolbar. You'll get this:

Adding a title for the new translation

Fill in the Title of your translation in the next dialog and save.

Copy contents from English

Fill the page by copying everything over from English (‘Language -> Copy all plugins from English’, at the bottom). You may need to zoom out your browser view (Ctrl and -) to reach the bottom-most entry in the drop-down menu item. The page will now contain the same texts and widgets as the English version does. To start translating, double-click on a text.

The editor window in WYSIWYG mode

An editor window will pop up and you can translate the text.

If something does not look correct (for example, because you accidentally deleted a certain html tag), you can choose to edit the html source, too.

Editing the html source

Links can be edited by double-clicking on them. Never try to copy a link from the English editor or website to the editor in your language, or to copy it from the editor's source mode to the source mode in your language. Just double-click and then change the link's text, and, if necessary, adapt the language part of the url for external links.

When you are done, save your work. Don't forget to leave a comment about your changes, or the dialog will not allow you to save. You can now take a look at your translation and if you are happy with your work, click on the Publish button at the top of the page. Only this will make your translation available to the site's visitors.

Take extra care to always check if the language you are editing is the one you actually want to edit. Please DO NOT translate a piece of text while under English or another language as you will cause trouble for that language. Also avoid using the ‘History -> Undo’ option, and the ‘Revert to Live’ option, as these are buggy and can cause other people's work to be lost.

Edit an existing translation

Many existing translations at inkscape.org are outdated, or contain a copy of an outdated English version. Please, before you start translating, make sure that you actually translate from the current English version. If the page is very outdated, consider deleting the blocks and copying all plugins from English, as described above in Adding a new translation.

To edit an existing translation, just go to the page in your language, toggle the ‘draft’ mode by clicking on the Edit button in the top bar and double-click on the widget you would like to translate.

If you edit an existing translation, because the English original has changed, you can do the following:

• Open the published English page, and also, in a second tab, your translation, in draft mode.
• Copy the new parts from English by selecting them with the mouse and hitting Ctrl+C.
• Paste them into a simple text editor, if they contain links or pictures (Ctrl+V), to remove the formatting and prevent plugins from being used on two different pages at the same time. If there are no links or other plugins, you can also paste directly into the editor window.
• Insert this into your existing translation, in the correct place (Ctrl+V). Never paste links directly into the editor window.
• Then translate the text.
• When you come to a link (this is a normal link, not a plugin link), right-click on it, select ‘Edit Link’ to see where it goes. Copy the destination. Close the dialog.
• Right-click on the link again, select ‘Unlink’.
• Translate the link's text.
• Select the new link's text with the mouse.
• From the dropdown list at the top left (‘Plugins’), choose ‘Link’.
• If the link is an internal link, so goes to another page on the website, use the dropdown to select the page it will go to. Add anchor below (without the #), if applicable.
• If the link is an external link, just paste the contents of your clipboard into the topmost line. You might have to add http:// or https:// at the start of the line.
• Save.
• Continue with translation :)

Translating News

News are a special case on the Inkscape website. To translate a news article, visit it in your own language, then select ‘News -> Translate News’ in the toolbar at the top.

News app: Dropdown for translating news. Note that the language you will translate to is the one displayed in your URL.

Then a window pops up where you can fill in your translation of the news. The text editor boxes for the excerpt and the news article contents will be pre-filled with the English version. You can also always see the English original when you click on ‘Show’ below the editor box.

Text can be formatted by using the text editor's buttons, links can be added by marking some text and clicking on the link symbol. Edit links by right-clicking on the link, then select ‘Edit link’ from the context menu. Save your translation when you're done.

News app: Translating a news article on the Inkscape website. The slug (last part of the url) must be unique.

News app: Right-click to edit a link

Known Issues

• When you double-click on a link in the news editor, you'll get a popup dialog where you cannot click on anything. If this happens, click on ‘Save’ in the parent dialog to not lose any translated work. Continue editing after this.
• When you save your translation for the first time, you may be redirected to a non-existent page (404 error). To return to the article to continue editing, just remove everything after the last slash in the url, and hit enter. Then select your article on the page where this brought you, and edit it again.

Translating other parts of the website

There are a lot of other translatable sentences and phrases on the Inkscape website, which cannot be translated directly on the website itself. Those include words such as ‘Log in’, ‘Register’, ‘Confirm’ and ‘Save’.

If your language is not yet available on our website, you're still very welcome to help! In this case please file a bug report. Then we can prepare the website for your changes and make the translation file available, so you can start working on it.

Easy way (no version control)

You can download the .po file (a standardized file format for software translations) for your language from the website's translation repository.

See here for info about how to deal with .po files.

When you want to send us your changes, open a bug report for our website and attach your .po file to it.

Version-controlled translations

If you would rather like to use version control for your translation work, the following steps are necessary (the first two code bits are for Debian-based Linux systems):

1. Install Bazaar:
   sudo apt-get install bzr
2. Optionally, install Lokalize or Poedit:
   sudo apt-get install lokalize or sudo apt-get install poedit
3. Change into a directory where you want to save the website translations, then get a copy of the code using:
   bzr branch lp:inkscape-web/translations
4. Work on the .po file for your language
5. When you're done (partial translations will help, too!), you can either:
   • Create a patch and attach it to a bug report:
     bzr diff > /some_directory/PATCH_FOR_LANGUAGE.patch
   • Or commit and upload to your own repository on Launchpad (you'll need a Launchpad account for this):
     bzr commit -m "Translated website strings for LANGUAGE, xx% complete"
bzr push lp:~yourname/inkscape-web/translations/my-awesome-branch
     Then visit your branch on the Launchpad website and make a merge request to ask for your changes to be included in the main branch.

Website Development

The Inkscape project has a side project — inkscape-web — which produces the website seen by users and used by everyone to find resources.

You can support the website development with things as easy as reporting bugs, or focused testing, or you can volunteer to test the web site more systematically before a new release. Other important areas where you can help us are website design, and website development. If you would like to help, contact Martin Owens (doctormo@gmail.com).

These are the most important links:

• The published website: https://inkscape.org/
• The staging website (testing): http://staging.inkscape.org/ (currently unavailable)
• The project on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/inkscape-web

The guide below is for helping with the website development and to get a running version of the website for design work. The code is available on Launchpad in a bzr repository.

Django and Python

The website is written in Python using the Django framework. It is a good idea to have a familiarity with Django and a fairly healthy experience with Python before starting code development on the website:

• To learn Python, attend these online classes: http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/python
• To get to know Django, see this tutorial: http://tutorial.djangogirls.org/

Local Development

You can start an instance of the website locally if you wish to work on the code or design.

Needed dependencies (on Fedora): python-virtualenv and python-dev.

bzr branch lp:inkscape-web
cd inkscape-web
./utils/init
./utils/run

This should download the code, set up the Python environment, set up your test database, download all the CMS data from staging and run the server (login: admin, password: 123456).

You can also run the django manage.py manually using:

./utils/manage [command]

Once your local instance is running, you can navigate your web browser to localhost:8000 and have fun.

The website's database is a local sqlite file in ./data/ as are all the uploaded files. These are not committed to the branch.

To sync the content with live again, use the refresh-cms command:

./utils/refresh-cms

To update your development version to the current trunk version, run:

bzr pull

To update your branch after a pull that introduces changes to the database structure or the installed applications, run:

./utils/update

Troubleshooting

• Make sure your path to your local copy of inkscape-web only contains ASCII characters.
• If you have any other issues setting up your local environment, email doctormo@gmail.com, send a message to the docs mailing list or create a bug report in the bug tracker for inkscape-web.

Committing and Bug Reports

We use Launchpad's bug tracker to report and track progress on bug reports. Please see https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape-web for possible things to fix.

You can use the fixes option when committing your fix to tie together the code and the bug report:

bzr commit --fixes=lp:798373 -m "I fixed that annoying bug"

Pushing Back

Once you have made your modifications, please commit back and push to your own branch for review unless otherwise granted permission to commit to trunk.

bzr push lp:~yourname/inkscape-web/my-awesome-branch

And ask for code review on Launchpad by following the link from your new code branch on the website.

Publishing your Changes

The trunk branch is open to commits by members of the inkscape-webadmin team. There are two other branches for live and staging that are used to control deployment.

Deployment of branches should happen automatically by cron script on the server, if your commit is stuck, please ask for help on the inkscape-docs mailing list and we can sort out any clogs.

The idea of the automatic deployment is that we can control the website via all the mechanisms we use to control code commits. This includes permissions, reversions, etc. Large changes can be held for review on staging while smaller changes can be merged into live without fuss.