Switch to hugo

[benmarwick]

Looks like you are using jekyll here? Have you taken a look at blogdown? It uses Hugo and is a much smoother experience rendering pages and so on. You never need to leave the R console. Documentation is excellent: https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/ It might make it easier to have community contributions if it is as simple as possible to edit pages, etc. Just a thought!

[nevrome]

We went the RStudio way here. Jekyll should not do anything. But as I look at it I see that there's no .nojekyll file yet. Should add this, I guess. Maybe that's what caused the trouble today in the afternoon, @MartinHinz?

[benmarwick]

I see, thanks. I wasn't familiar with that method, but now I see that it looks very easy and similar to blogdown. There is no Jekyll involved, my mistake.

[joeroe]

As the website gets more complicated I also think we might consider blogdown. The workflow is basically the same, but will let us organise things into categories and e.g. easily render the meeting minutes as proper pages. There are some instructions for using blogdown with GitHub Pages here: https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/github-pages.html.

[nevrome]

Well - I guess we could as well change to blogdown, but what exactly would we win over the current setup?

I think there is rather an argument to be made to ditch R altogether and switch to a static system like docsify. That would make editing the page more easy. Could be done on github in the browser then.

[joeroe]

What I like about static site generators (and we yeah could ditch the Rmd step and go with straight hugo or jekyll) is the tools for organising content. We could for example turn the current sections for sessions and meeting minutes into hugo archetypes, keeping the markdown content the same, and just as easy to edit, but getting a consistent layout, index pages, taxonomies, and a dated feed "for free".

I haven't used docsify, but it seems the ease of editing is about the same with any system based on markdown? It's R that's adding the extra step, and we probably don't really need it.

If you don't mind, maybe it's easier if I start a branch and prototype something so you can see what I mean.

[nevrome]

Go ahead 👍 - I have no strong opinions how the content should be rendered.

[MartinHinz]

Thank you for the proposal and the offer! I personally have only experience with Jekyll so far, but maybe Hugo is the choice? The archetype-thing sounds very interesting!

Btw, there were some complains about the color scheme of the current website, something to discuss at the next meeting!?

[zackbatist]

Yeah, there were some concerns about accessibility for the website. I created issue #37 to track progress on that.

[joeroe]

Okay I have a rough prototype using hugo (without R/blogdown) at http://joeroe.io/sslarch.github.io/. It's automatically built from https://github.com/joeroe/sslarch.github.io on push using a GitHub Action.

The main advantage I see is the automatic organisation into sections with a menu and indexes, which can be easily extended by just adding new md files and directories. We can also customise the way specific types of content display in lists and as a single view, see e.g. the members list.

For the sake of time I didn't replicate the style we're currently using, just picked an off-the-shelf hugo theme that's close to it. We can easily reproduce the old one or go with something else if that's what's preferred. Also note that the members list is no longer a tsv. It would be possible to get that functionality back by writing an R script that generates .md pages from a table, like Zack does with zackbatist/open-archaeo, although I don't think asking new members to "sign up" by creating a file for themselves in content/members/ would be that bad either?

[zackbatist]

Looks great to me! My only suggestion would be to add breadcrumbs to help determine the logical organization of the site and navigate accordingly.

[joeroe]

@zackbatist Good idea. I've added them.

[nevrome]

I love it. The layout is also fine for me. Some small suggestions, @joeroe (not necessarily to be implemented by you):

• The CAA/SSLA $ icon in the top left still leads to your own homepage, @joeroe (maybe this is fixed automatically after merging?)
• The page should prominently feature our logo (the logo might also guide the selection of the colour theme)
• The Steering Committee members in members should not be ordered alphabetically, but according to their role: Convener - Vice Convener - Secretary
• The sessions tab should get a better menu layout