This page is “highly stylized”, with a masonry-like grid, that i did not
know how to generate automatically from data defined in PostgreSQL,
therefore with Oriol we agreed to have this one as a static page and
we will see what we can do if the customer asks to be able to change
it.
I was a bit undecided on whether the icons in the bottom part of the
page should be defined in the CSS or with style="" and CSS variables,
like i do for the campsite type in the home page.
At first i thought that it should use CSS variables, mostly for
coherence: if another section of the web does it for its background
image, why no this one. The difference is that the home page is
dynamically created from the database, while this page is static and we
know what icons we need, thus it makes more sense to move it to the
stylesheet file, because then it will be downloaded by user agents that
actually want to use it (e.g., browsers, but not Braille terminals).
I debated with myself whether to create the home_carousel relation or
rather if it would be better to have a single carousel relation for all
pages. However, i thought that it would be actually harder to maintain
a single relation because i would need an additional column to tell one
carrousel from another, and what would that column be? An enum? A
foreign key to another relation? home_carousel carries no such issues.
I was starting to duplicate logic all over the packages, such as the
way to encode media paths or “localization” (l10n) input fields.
Therefore, i refactorized them.
In the case of media path, i added a function that accepts rows of
media, because always need the same columns from the row, and it was
yet another repetition if i needed to pass them all the time. Plus,
these kind of functions can be called as `table.function`, that make
them look like columns from the table; if PostgreSQL implemented virtual
generated columns, i would have used that instead.
I am not sure whether that media_path function can be immutable. An
immutable function is “guaranteed to return the same results given the
same arguments forever”, which would be true if the inputs where the
hash and the original_filename columns, instead of the whole rows, but
i left it as static because i did not know whether PostgreSQL interprets
the “same row but with different values” as a different input. That is,
whether PostgreSQL’s concept of row is the actual tuple or the space
that has a rowid, irrespective of contents; in the latter case, the
function can not be immutable. Just to be in the safe side, i left it
stable.
The home page was starting to grow a bit too much inside the app
package, new that it has its own admin handler, and moved it all to a
separate package.
There is a big difference between the item that has the submenu for
lodges and languages: languages is a link to the “alternate” version of
the page, while the lodges has no page to link to. Therefore, one is an
anchor while the other is a button, to make a semantic difference, but
both have the exact same appearance here.
This is the image that is shown at the home page, and maybe other pages
in the future. We can not use a static file because this image can be
changed by the customer, not us; just like name and description.
I decided to keep the actual media content in the database, but to copy
this file out to the file system the first time it is accessed. This is
because we are going to replicate the database to a public instance that
must show exactly the same image, but the customer will update the image
from the private instance, behind a firewall. We could also synchronize
the folder where they upload the images, the same way we will replicate,
but i thought that i would make the whole thing a little more brittle:
this way if it can replicate the update of the media, it is impossible
to not have its contents; dumping it to a file is to improve subsequent
requests to the same media.
I use the hex representation of the media’s hash as the URL to the
resource, because PostgreSQL’s base64 is not URL save (i.e., it uses
RFC2045’s charset that includes the forward slash[0]), and i did not
feel necessary write a new function just to slightly reduce the URLs’
length.
Before checking if the file exists, i make sure that the given hash is
an hex string, like i do for UUID, otherwise any other check is going
to fail for sure. I moved out hex.Valid function from UUID to check for
valid hex values, but the actual hash check is inside app/media because
i doubt it will be used outside that module.
[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2045#section-6.8
As previously stated, web made the design with an external tool and
had to “convert” it to proper CSS and HTML markup.
Unfortunately, the original design uses slick, that requires jQuery;
i can’t do anything about it now.
Disabled most of the menu and language switcher because it is not in the
design yet.
For now, this is almost identical to the campsite types, but this
section is for purely informational pages that have no other relation
to the database than “belongs to the same company”.
Part of #33.
Had to export and move PublicPage struct to template because i can not
import app from campsites/types: app already imports campsite for the
http handler, and it, in turn, imports the types package for its own
http handler; an import loop.
Also had to replace PublicPage.MustRender with a Setup function because
the page passed down to html/template was the PublicPage struct, not
whatever struct embeds it. I was thinking more of Java inheritance here
rather than struct embedding.
The language switcher needs the same information as languageLinks
needed, namely the list of locales and the current Path, to construct
the URI to all alternate versions. However, in this case i need access
to this data in the template context, to build the list of links.
At first i use request’s context to hold the list of available locales
from application, and it worked, possibly without ill-effects, but i
realized that i was doing it just to avoid a new parameter. Or, more
precise, an _explicit_ parameter; the context was used to skip the
inner functions between app and template.MustRenderPublic, but the
parameter was there all the same.
Finally, i thought that some handler might want to filter the list of
locales to show only the ones that it has a translation of. In that
case, i would need to extract the locales from the context, filter it,
and create a new request with the updated context. That made little
sense, and made me add the explicit locales parameter.
Since now the template has the same data as languageLinks, there is
little point of having the link in the HTTP response headers, and added
the <link> elements to <head>.
I thought that maybe i could avoid these <links> as they give the exact
same data as the language switch, but Google says nothing of using
regular anchors to gather information about localized versions of the
document[0], thus i opted to be conservative. One can reason that the
<head> has more weight for Google, as most sites with user-generated
content, which could contain these anchors, rarely allow users to edit
the <head>.
[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions
I need to check that the user is an employee (or admin) in
administration handlers, but i do not want to do it for each handler,
because i am bound to forget it. Thus, i added the /admin sub-path for
these resources.
The public-facing web is the rest of the resources outside /admin, but
for now there is only home, to test whether it works as expected or not.
The public-facing web can not relay on the user’s language settings, as
the guest user has no way to set that. I would be happy to just use the
Accept-Language header for that, but apparently Google does not use that
header[0], and they give four alternatives: a country-specific domain,
a subdomain with a generic top-level domain (gTLD), subdirectories with
a gTLD, or URL parameters (e.g., site.com?loc=de).
Of the four, Google does not recommend URL parameters, and the customer
is already using subdirectories with the current site, therefor that’s
what i have chosen.
Google also tells me that it is a very good idea to have links between
localized version of the same resources, either with <link> elements,
Link HTTP response headers, or a sitemap file[1]; they are all
equivalent in the eyes of Google.
I have choosen the Link response headers way, because for that i can
simply “augment” ResponseHeader to automatically add these headers when
the response status is 2xx, otherwise i would need to pass down the
original URL path until it reaches the template.
Even though Camper is supposed to be a “generic”, multi-company
application, i think i will stick to the easiest route and write the
templates for just the “first” customer.
[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/managing-multi-regional-sites
[1]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions
jordi fita mas