Editing the BCRA website using an HTML-Like Markup
Page written by David Gibson
Click/Tap a link or scroll on down.
Introduction
The BCRA web pages are not suitable for editing by unqualified 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 BCRA Information and
Charity Policies pages.
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
- Go to the last 'chapter' on one of the above-listed pages, which is titled Staff
Information or something similar.
- Click on the link to Download a plain-text version, which will open up a new page
containing the markup data.
- Select all the text (ctrl-a, ctrl-c) and paste it into your editor.
- 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.
- Email the file to the website editor who will run it through a verification program and
then upload it.
- 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...
- The so-called HTML-like markup I am providing for you to edit is 'real' HTML but
with the < and > angle brackets replaced by square brackets [ and
]. That is so that you can read the file into a word-processing application like Word without
it trying to interpret the text as HTML, and messing everything up.
- Your downloaded file is only the 'core' of the web page. There is a lot of preamble and
post-amble that is added to create a properly-constructed full web page, as displayed on your
screen.
- In this type of markup file, so-called 'white-space' is not significant. You cannot
format your text using spaces, tabs or carriage returns because they will be ignored. If you want
to do that sort of thing you will need to learn some HTML or explain to the website editor what
you want to achieve.
- However, if you just want to make a spelling correction, or to
change a sentence, those minor edits are easy. You can add entire paragraphs but you must
indicate the start and end of the text with a pair of paragraph markup tags, [p]Like
this[/p].
- If you dont know how to do something, you can write a note to
the website editor, like please put a link to mydocument.doc here or please use
my photo here.
There are some rules about the use of characters...
- You must not use the characters < or > in your text.
- You must only use [ and ] to mark the position of HTML tags. If you want
to use those as visible characters you must 'escape' them by writing them as double characters,
i.e. [[ and ]].
- Strictly speaking, you are limited to a simple ascii character set, with all other
characters needing to be replaced by so-called HTML entities. If you know how to do that,
great; but if you dont, just carry on anyway and your text will be sanitised when the website
editor processes it.
Expert Editing
If you understand HTML, you can use an HTML editor to construct your text. But...
- You will need to convert all the square brackets to angle brackets and then
un-escape << and >> combinations to [[ and ]]. This is
not as straightforward as it might seem. After editing you will need to do the reverse
exercise.
- Alternatively, ask the website editor to supply the phtml file for the page you
want to edit.
- You will need to supply any CSS files that you require – or use embedded
style-sheets.
