writeit.poplus.org

The promotional site for the Poplus component, WriteIt. Compiled using Jekyll and hosted by Github at http://writeit.poplus.org

Local development

The templates in _layouts and the majority of the styles in assets/sass/ should be kept in sync with other poplus.org projects like https://github.com/mysociety/popit.poplus.org and https://github.com/mysociety/mapit.poplus.org

Styling changes specific to the WriteIt site should be made in assets/sass/_writeit-styles.scss.

Compile the Sass files using (docs):

sass --watch assets/sass:css

Running a local web server

You can preview your changes without pushing to Github by running a local Jekyll web server.

First, install Jekyll, as per the Jekyll docs, then go into the project folder and start a local server:

gem install jekyll
cd writeit.poplus.org
jekyll serve --watch --baseurl ''

The --baseurl option is part of an elegant hack to replicate the Github Pages hosting structure locally.

As long as the server is running, your site will be available at http://0.0.0.0:4000. Local changes will be reflected automatically, thanks to the --watch flag.

Remember, when you’re editing links or paths in the HTML, to use the {{ site.baseurl }} template tag for internal links. Take a look in _includes/html-head.html for an example.

Deploying changes

The site is hosted via Github Pages. To ‘deploy’ your changes from the master branch, merge them into the gh-pages branch:

git checkout gh-pages
git merge master
git push origin gh-pages

Your changes will then be visible at http://mysociety.github.io/writeit.poplus.org and, once we’ve sorted out DNS, http://writeit.poplus.org too.

Remember to switch back into the master branch (or a feature branch) when continuing to make changes after deployment!

git checkout master