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RFC2850

How to maintain the IAB pages

Home»How to maintain the IAB pages

The IAB webpages are maintained through wordpress.  Whereby WP is used more as a CMS than a blogging platform.

There are a few conventions you should be aware of when maintaining the site.

Installed pluggins

The site relies on the following plugins to be active:

  • Deactivate Visual Editor which disables the Visual editor in the admin panel whenever the custom field deactiveate_visual_editor is true. The visual editor must be deactivated for pages that contain PHP code
  • Exec-PHP needed to run PHP code, see below.
  • Redirection needed to redirect the paths used in the old site to content as maintained in the WP site
  • WP Hide Pages allows one to select certain pages to be excluded from menus and such. It is used to hide this particular page.

Menu pages

There are a number of pages under which some sort of structure resides. Examples of those are the Minutes, and the Documents and Correspondence pages.
Those pages contain a blob of PHP code that constructs the underlying content. Those pages should, when created, have the disable_visual_editor custom field set to true.

When creating a new menu page a simple copy and paste from an existing menu page will do.

Forcing Menu Order

For minutes it is important to have a last version published on the top. To force a certain order in a page menu you can set the “Order” in the field attribute. For the Minutes index pages the order is set to YYYY-2088. Within a year we use the date of the meeting to create an order number: 1231-MMDD. Minutes of the May 25 meeting would have order 1231-0525=706

Those nifty side boxes

You can add all sorts of meta information using the “Custom Fields” those will be printed in boxes to the left of your text. Except when the disable_visual_editor field is set in which case the php page generation code will skip producing the boxes.

The reason for that is that the_meta() function code would need to be overwritten and that may lead to maintenance issues down the road.

Hiding Pages

This page and the Website Todo page are both hidden through the use of the “Hide Pages” plug-in.

The controls for hiding pages is to be found under the “Hide Pages” in the “Settings menu”.

Mini Howto: Migrating pages from the old IAB website

Suppose we copy the content from the old IAB site under the 1999 correspondence.

First we make a clean copy and paste from the correspondence index into a page with page title “1999” that has the “IAB Correspondence …” page as its parent. In order to not clash with other pages that cary a date as their title we will need to change the permalink to read:

1999

You can only change that path after you saved the draft because that will update the path to reflect it has a parent.

After you ‘cut-and-paste’ from the original site you will have to check all the links in the path and change them accordingly. For instance the orgininal 1999 page contained a item
<li>IAB preliminary comments on proposed ICANN Ad Hoc Group, <a href="http://www.iab.org/documents/docs/ad-hoc-group.txt">Mail Message</a>.

3 thinks need to happen to migrate that content:

  1. A new page is created with the content of the ‘ad-hoc-group.txt’ file. That page has the 1999 index page as a parent (e.g. the page above has been copied into: /documents/correspondence-reports-documents/docs99/ad-hoc-group-on-numbering). Optionally you may want to backdate the publishing date.
  2. A redirect need to be created using the Redirection plugin: /documents/docs/ad-hog-group.txt redirected to: /documents/correspondence-reports-documents/docs99/ad-hoc-group-on-numbering/
  3. And the link in the 1999 index page will need to be point to the new location (using a relative path).

To add an RFC follow the following process:

  1. Create a page using a title <RFC Title>,RFC<NO>, <month> <year> put the document under the year where it is reported and change the permalinkto  instead of the tile contain the rfc number.
  2. Copy and paste the appropriate code:<iframe name=”” src=”http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3002″ width=”100%” height=”900px” />

Attachements, PDFs, and Media

Sometime we need to upload material to the website. For instance, under Correspondence and Reports 2001 there is an “itu.pdf” document that we refer to. There is a preference to refer to the original media (e.g. on the laision tracker) but if needed the document should be uploaded and attached to a page.

Use the ‘star like’ icon to the right of the “Upload/Insert” above the editor screen to upload media.