Didymus.org

Rebuilt static site + CMS for didymus.org ("Early Christian Spirituality and Spiritual Direction"), replacing the original Weebly-hosted site. Built to survive platform shutdowns (Weebly, then Square) by keeping content as plain files in this git repo — no proprietary export format, no vendor lock-in.

How it works

• Eleventy (eleventy.config.js) builds static HTML from markdown content in src/pages/*.md.
• Each page is a markdown file with front-matter: title, slug, and an optional list of attachments (PDFs/docs available for download).
• Decap CMS (admin/) provides a simple web-based editor at /admin/ — add or edit a page, upload a PDF — with no git or code knowledge required. It commits changes straight to this repo.
• GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/deploy.yml) rebuilds and deploys to GitHub Pages automatically on every push to main (including CMS edits).
• Original PDFs/docs live in www.didymus.org/uploads/3/4/2/1/3421357/ and are served as-is for download alongside the page text.

Content migration

www.didymus.org/*.html is the original archived Weebly mirror (captured 2026-07-22), kept as the source for the one-time conversion in scripts/convert.js, which extracted each page's title, body text, and file attachments into src/pages/*.md. Re-run it only if you need to re-import from the archive; day-to-day editing should happen through /admin/ or by editing src/pages/*.md directly.

Local development

npm install
npx eleventy --serve   # http://localhost:8080

Editor setup (one-time, for the non-technical editor)

Decap CMS's GitHub backend needs OAuth to let a browser commit to this repo on the editor's behalf. Since GitHub Pages is static-only, this needs one small piece of external plumbing:

1. Create a GitHub OAuth App (Settings → Developer settings → OAuth Apps) for this repo. Homepage URL is the site's URL; callback URL is the proxy URL below + /callback.
2. Deploy decap-proxy — a small, self-hosted OAuth proxy — to Cloudflare Workers (free tier). It does the GitHub OAuth token exchange that a static GitHub Pages site can't do itself. admin/config.yml's backend.base_url points at this deployed Worker (currently https://decap-proxy.didymus.workers.dev).
3. Give the editor's GitHub account write access to this repo (as a collaborator), then send them to https://<your-domain>/admin/ to log in with GitHub and start editing.

Everything the CMS does is a normal git commit — nothing is ever unrecoverable, and if Decap CMS itself ever goes away, the content underneath it is just markdown files any future tool (or a text editor) can read.

SEO

• Each page gets its own <title>/description and a clean URL (/slug/) instead of Weebly's bloated markup.
• /sitemap.xml lists every page for search engine crawlers.
• /sitemap/ is a human-readable index of all pages.

Custom domain

src/static/CNAME is deployed to the site root so GitHub Pages serves this under www.didymus.org — point that domain's DNS at GitHub Pages per GitHub's custom domain docs.

Original archive

The raw Weebly mirror (www.didymus.org/*.html, cdn2.editmysite.com/, www.weebly.com/) is kept in the repo as the historical source and as a fallback — see ARCHIVE.md for details on that snapshot.