Updates.Thunderbird.Net (UTN)

The new home of our what’s new and donation appeal pages!

Getting Started

Follow the basic setup for thunderbird-website located in README.md.

Don’t forget to familiarize yourself with the template language Jinja!

Once that’s setup and confirmed working you can start the dev server for UTN by running:

python build-site.py --watch --updates --debug --devmode

After running that the dev server will give you an address (usually http://localhost:8000 unless you’ve changed the port.) You may also use the --enus option to only build English (US) pages.

Folder Structure

For the most part you’ll want to stick to either the thunderbird or thunderbird-android folders as those are the folders that get rendered by our custom static site generator. The includes folder is used for jinja includes, extends, and macros.

For example, if you were making a what’s new page for Thunderbird 400.0 ESR you would create your index.html at sites/updates.thunderbird.net/thunderbird/400.0esr/whats-new/index.html.

If you’re making an appeal attach it to the most up-to-date ESR unless the appeal is attached to a specific project. i.e. donation appeal for Thunderbird for Android would go sites/updates.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-android/40.0/appeal.

In the event we do something new and creative, use common sense and update this document!

For new assets follow the existing convention, any non-l10n images go in media/img/appeal/<appeal> or media/img/whatsnew/<whatsnew>. Likewise for svgs media/svg/appeal/<appeal> or media/svg/whatsnew/<whatsnew>. You can locale specific images by placing media in media/l10n/<locale>/<path similar to img> and using the l10n_img jinja helper function in your page.

Creating A New Page

A copy-and-pastable template is included in sites/updates.thunderbird.net/includes/_templates/basic-page.html.

Simply copy and paste that template to its new home. Once resettled, change the active_page jinja variable to match your page name in kebab-case, this will namespace your page for styling by giving you the class page-<active_page>. Additionally, the page_title and page_desc variable controls the rendered HTML page title and page description respectively.

Compressing Assets

Unfortunately we don’t compress assets automatically, you’ll have to use the tools/compress_assets.py at least once. For that you’ll need to install required dependencies in the project root:

cd ../
pip install -r requirements-image.txt

After which you’ll be able to run the tool like:

cd ../
python tools/compress_assets.py -r media/img/thunderbird/appeal/mycoolappeal/

Which will compress any images inside media/img/thunderbird/appeal/mycoolappeal/ recursively. Additionally, there’s an overwrite existing converted images option with -o.

L10N

Follow the instructions located in l10n_tools/readme.md to compile and extract strings.