3. Base Configs and Conventions

Using the CollectionBuilder-Remix Spreadsheet

Once your site is up and running, the Google Sheet is where almost all of your day-to-day work happens. This page explains how the spreadsheet is organized and walks through your first tab: config.

How the Spreadsheet Is Organized

The spreadsheet is made up of eleven tabs, each controlling a different part of your site. The tabs are ordered left to right in the sequence you're most likely to need them, and color-coded to tell you how comfortable you should feel editing each one:

Tab	Color	Meaning
main-metadata	🟢 Dark green	Your collection items. This is where most of your time goes.
config	🟢 Dark green	Your site's basic identity — safe and expected to edit.
pages	🟢 Light green	Your site's written pages (About, Home, How to Cite, etc.).
translation	🟢 Light green	UI text translations (button labels, section headers).
nav-bar	🟡 Yellow	Your navigation menu structure — edit with care.
metadata-orchestrator	🟡 Yellow	Controls how metadata fields behave across the site — edit with care.
config-table	🟠 Orange	Data-table display settings — discouraged unless you know what you're doing.
config-map	🟠 Orange	Map display settings — discouraged.
config-search	🟠 Orange	Search index settings — discouraged.
config-browse	🟠 Orange	Browse-page settings — discouraged.
config-theme	🔴 Red	Deep site behavior and styling — the most discouraged tab.

And within any tab: ⬜ grey cells are never edited. Grey marks the internal keys and labels the code depends on — the category/field/translate_id columns you'll see throughout the workbook. Changing, deleting, or reordering a grey cell can break the site; only cells with white or colored fill are meant for your input.

Keep this legend in mind as you move across the tabs — it tells you, at a glance, how much caution a given tab deserves before you touch it. This page covers the first tab, config; later tabs will get their own sections as we go.

First Tab to Edit: config 🟢

The config tab sets the basic identity of your site: its web address, its title and description, its languages, and its author credit. Every CB-Remix site needs this tab filled in correctly before anything else will work, which is why it comes first. It's marked green — you're meant to fill it in, and most rows are low-risk — but a couple of fields (url and baseurl) can break the entire site if entered wrong, so those specific rows are worth extra care even though the tab as a whole is safe territory.

Structure

The tab has three columns:

Column	Editable?	Purpose
category	⬜ No — grey	The internal name of each setting. The code looks for these exact labels, so don't rename, delete, reorder, or add rows here.
content	✅ Yes	Your actual value for that setting. This is the only column you should be typing into.
comment	Optional	Space for your own notes (e.g., reminders for collaborators). Leave blank or use freely — it isn't read by the site.

Below is the full list of category rows you'll see, using an example collection as reference:

category	content	comment
url	https://eugestumm.github.io
baseurl	/gender-inclusive-spanish-digital-archive
source-code	https://github.com/eugestumm/gender-inclusive-spanish-digital-archive
author	Euge Stumm and Ben Papadopoulos
lang1	English
lang1-id	en
lang2	Español
lang2-id	es
title-lang1	Gender-Inclusive Spanish Digital Archive
tagline-lang1	A Free and Open-Access Compilation of Resources in Gender Inclusive Spanish
description-lang1	The Gender-Inclusive Spanish Digital Archive is a Digital Humanities project tracing the emergence of gender-inclusive Spanish through the colonial period...
title-lang2	Archivo Digital de Español No Binario
tagline-lang2	Una Compilación Gratuita y de Acceso Abierto de Recursos en Español No Binario
description-lang2	El Archivo Digital de Español No Binario es un proyecto de Humanidades Digitales que rastrea el surgimiento del español inclusivo de género...
featured-image	/assets/img/hispanic_world_non_binary.jpg

That's the complete list — 15 rows.

Row-by-row guide

⚠️ Site address — the two fields to double-check

• url — The root web address where your site is hosted, with no trailing slash. For a GitHub Pages site this is almost always https://your-username.github.io.
• baseurl — The path to your specific project, matching your repository name exactly, starting with a slash and with no trailing slash at the end (e.g., /gender-inclusive-spanish-digital-archive).
  • Together, url + baseurl should form the exact address of your live site. If either one has a typo, an extra slash, or a missing slash, links and images across your whole site can break.
• source-code — A link to your GitHub repository. This just powers a "view source" link in the site footer — low risk to edit.

Project credit

• author — The name(s) of the collection's creator(s), shown in site credits and metadata.

Language settings

• lang1 — The display name of your site's primary language. Click the cell and you'll get a dropdown limited to English, Português, or Español, the languages with translations natively available on CollectionBuilder-Remix. In case you want to utilize a different language, you can remove the dropdown list and insert your own language.

• lang1-id — You don't fill this in. It's a formula that reads lang1 and automatically outputs the matching short code (en, pt, or es). However, in case you are adding a different language, you can manually insert their respective code here.

• lang2 — Your site's second language. Same dropdown as lang1, plus one more option: none, for a single-language site.

• lang2-id — Also a formula, auto-filled from lang2 (and set to none if you chose none above).

  Because these codes are computed rather than typed, you can't misspell a language ID — just make sure lang1 and lang2 are set to actual different languages (or none). CB-Remix's config currently only has two language slots; there's no lang3. In the future, further support for three or more languages will be added.

Site text — worth spending real time on

These are the words visitors actually read, so feel free to revise them as much as you like:

• title-lang1 / title-lang2 — Your site's title, in each language. Shown in the browser tab, the site header, and search results.
• tagline-lang1 / tagline-lang2 — A short one-line subtitle shown near your title.
• description-lang1 / description-lang2 — A longer paragraph describing your project. This is used for your homepage's "About" text and for search engine and social media previews, so it's worth writing thoughtfully in both languages.

Featured image

• featured-image — The path to the image used to represent your whole site (for example, in social media link previews). This path is relative to your site's root, starting with a slash (e.g., /assets/img/hispanic_world_non_binary.jpg).
  • This only works if a file with that exact name has actually been uploaded to that folder in your GitHub repository. If the path doesn't match a real file, the image simply won't show up — it won't break your site, but double-check the spelling and file extension.

That's everything on config — 15 rows in total.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Adding or removing a trailing slash on url or baseurl (neither should end in /).
• Typing your repository name into baseurl without the leading /.
• Typing over the lang1-id / lang2-id cells by hand — leave them alone and let the formula fill them in from lang1 / lang2.
• Picking the same language for both lang1 and lang2 instead of setting lang2 to none for a single-language site.
• Leaving title-lang2, tagline-lang2, or description-lang2 in the same language as lang1 by mistake — these are meant to be full translations.
• Referencing a featured-image file that hasn't been uploaded yet, or misspelling its filename/extension.
• Editing anything in the category column (grey) — if a row's label gets changed or deleted, the site can no longer find that setting at all.

Once your config tab is filled in, remember: like any spreadsheet edit, it won't appear on your live site until you run Sync content from Spreadsheet in GitHub Actions.