Map hierarchy and links between web pages as specified in a yaml file
This script expects Python v3 with pyyaml and graphviz installed. The script was developed with Anaconda python3 on Ubuntu linux.
To install the dependencies on linux
pip3 install pyyaml
pip3 install graphviz
Edit the definition.yaml file to represent the pages
Check the file is formatted ok with yamllint:
yamllint definition.yaml
If there are no issues, then proceed, else stop and fix.
Run python3 mapper.py and inspect the output (a graphical illustration of the pages should appear, although there may be warnings if the yaml file is not complete, e.g. missing pages that are referred to in links, missing parents of pages etc).
The graph is saved both as links.gv.pdf and links.gv.png in the sub-directory ./output
The parent-child hierarchy of the pages is shown with solid black lines. These parent-child relationships affect the "level" of the page, with Home at the top.
The page-to-page links are shown in dashed blue lines with arrowheads. These do not affect the level of the page in the graph, so that pages should be shown in a fairly sensible hierarchical tree.
Yaml is fussy about spacing and formatting, but even so, is going to be easier to edit than trying to describe the page maps in an excel doc, for example.
Each page requires a name and parent field, but the label and links fields are optional.
If the label field is not present, then the name is put into title case, and underscores are replaced with spaces, and this becomes the label shown in the graph.
The name must be typed exactly in the following fields: name, parent, links or else there will be warnings. Capitalisation is ignored to make things a little easier. For example, a link of Careers to the page named careers will work, but career will NOT link to careers correctly because the letters are different. For this reason, it is recommened to use underscores where there are spaces in the name field, or to shorten names to avoid spaces altogether (specify a pretty name with spaces in it, in the label field in this case). Note that all interlinking is via the name field, NOT the label field - the label field is for display only.
example snippet describing the careers page:
- name: careers
parent: home
links:
- study
- student_experience
Note: do not edit the home page entry. It does not need the parent field, and is the only page that is allowed to have no parent.
Line styles and page boxes can be styled - if the map becomes unruly, or needs colouring etc, then consider adding attributes to the page definitions that link to specific colour maps etc.