Main Landing Page | PMD Source Code Analyzer

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The main homepage of PMD https://pmd.github.io is hosted by Github Pages.

The repository is https://github.com/pmd/pmd.github.io.

It uses Jekyll to generate the static html pages. Jekyll is executed by github for every push to the repository. Please note, that it takes some time until Jekyll has been executed and due to caching, the homepage is not updated immediately. It usually takes 15 minutes.

Main page - aka “Landing page”: https://pmd.github.io
- Layout: _layouts/default.html. It includes all the sub section, which can be found in the includes directory _includes/
- The latest PMD version is configured in _config.yml and the variables site.pmd.latestVersion are used e.g. in _includes/home.html.
Blog - aka “News”: https://pmd.github.io/news/
- This is a section on main page. It shows the 5 latest news. See _includes/news.html.
- There is also a sub page “news” which lists all news.
  - Layout: _layouts/news.html
  - Page (which is pretty empty): news.html

Building the page locally

Since the repository contains the documentation for many old PMD releases, it is quite big. When executing Jekyll to generate the site, it copies all the files to the folder _site/ - and this can take a while.

In order to speed things up locally, consider to add pmd-* to the exclude patterns in _config.yml. See also the comments in this file.

Then it is a matter of simply executing bundle exec jekyll serve. This will generate the site and host it on localhost, so you can test the page at http://127.0.0.1:4000.

Updates during a release

When creating a new PMD release, some content of the main page need to be updated as well. This done as part of the Release process, but is summarized here as well:

The versions (e.g. pmd.latestVersion) needs to be updated in _config.yml
- This is needed to generate the correct links and texts for the latest version on landing page
The new PMD documentation needs to be copied to /pmd-<version>/
Then this folder needs to copied to /latest/, actually replacing the old version.
A new blog post with release notes is added: /_posts/YYYY-mm-dd-PMD-<version>.md
The sitemap sitemap.xml is regenerated

Some of these steps are automated through do-release.sh (like blog post), some are manual steps (updating the version in _config.yml) and other steps are done on the travis-ci-build (like copying the new documentation).

Adding a new blog post

Adding a new blog post is as easy as:

Creating a new file in the folder “_posts”: /_posts/YYYY-mm-dd-<title>.md
The file name needs to fit this pattern. The date of the blog post is taken from the file name. The “" is used for the url.
The file is a markdown file starting with a frontmatter for jekyll. Just use this template for the new file:

---
layout: post
title: Title
---

Here comes the text

Once you commit and push it, Github will run Jekyll and update the page. The Jekyll templates take care that the new post is recognized and added to the news section and also on the news subpage.