MIBS Website

Homepage of the McGill Integrative Bioscience Society

• A simple website built for MIBS from McGill University
• Forked from 'so-simple-theme'.

Installation

Development Requirements

• Ruby
• Jekyll

Setup

• Once you have Ruby and Jekyll installed, clone this repository to your computer
• Open a terminal (Windows: cmd.exe) and navigate to the directory where you saved this repository (e.g. cd ~/Downloads/mibs-site)
• Install Gems and other dependencies by entering gem install bundler jekyll followed by bundle install in your terminal

How to use

Viewing locally

• To view the website locally, run bundle exec jekyll serve in your terminal and then navigate to localhost:4000 in your browser
• Another simple way to run the project locally would be by using the Webserver plugin for Chrome. Select the folder _site after running the app and navigate to the specified port with localhost:<PortNumber>.

Directory structure

The root folder contains:

• README.md: this file
• Gemfile & Gemfile.lock: software dependencies
• LICENSE: text explaining usage rights
• /_config.yml: global variables
• .md files corresponding to each page on the site including index.md for the homepage
• subdirectories to hold each type of data (e.g. /_profs_cs holds a file for each of the CS professors)
• /_site where the compiled version of the site is saved
• /_data: sitemap
• /_includes: theme assets
• /_layouts: page structures
• /_sass: styling
• /assets: css, html, and images

How to edit

• Edit the corresponding .md file that matches the path name of the page on the website
• Build the files after editing all needed content with bundle exec jekyll build
• This should generate the updated _site folder

Editing markdown files

• Under normal circumstances, do not modify the first block of variables. These contain sensitive and important data for the website to work, such as permalink, layout, etc.
• Some exceptions are the title variable (which will be unique to each page) and the context-specific variables relating to the details of particular faculties, alumni, council members, etc.
• The variables' names are meant to be easy to understand, and even if you're having difficulty, simply see where the associated text appears on the website itself before editing.
• Each of the council members, staff members, events, etc. ("records") is an individual file which are all sorted into folders by type. You can edit the details of any record by looking in the collection it's part of and finding the corresponding file in that folder. For example, if you want to add a new council member, simply go to the _council_members folder and add a new .md file, strictly following the structure of a council member:

---
number: <Number>
name: <Name>
position: <Position>
image: <Image>
---
<TextDescription>

• Text formatting follows usual markdown .md rules (for help, consult this page)

Editing images

• On pages with images, you will see a corresponding image variable at the head of the .md file.
• You can specify the path of any image saved under assets/images/<ImageName/> . The recommended formats are .jpg and .png.
• Additional information can be inserted for images as follows:

image:
    path: assets/images/RVH-crop.jpg
    caption: "McGill University Campus"

Deploying

• Github Pages support is out-of-the-box. Simply create a repository named .github.io and push the project folder. On the 'Settings' section of your repository, enable Github-Pages, and you're done. Github will automatically give you a subdomain, but in order to use another DNS, simply include the CNAME file in the repository root.
• Otherwise, depending on the deployment environment, usually all you need to do is to drop the _site folder on your chosen web server's root directory.
• Check the Jekyll documentation for further details

Credits

• LS
• EY