TESS Website

The website for astronomers using NASA's TESS space telescope.

Live URL: https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/tess/

Test URL: http://tessgi.github.io/TessGiWebsite/

Quickstart

TESS's Guest Investigator Program Website can be edited by modifying the text files in the content sub-directory of this repository, compiling them using make html (or make devserver), and sending them to the server using make live. The essential commands for Kepler/K2 staff are:

$ git clone https://github.com/tessgi/TessGiWebsite.git
$ cd TessGiWebsite
$ make devserver
$ firefox http://localhost:8000

# make changes in the `content` sub-directory
# and preview them at http://localhost:8000

$ git add content/file-you-changed.md
$ git commit -m 'Explain your change'
$ git push
$ make live

In what follows these steps are explained in more detail.

Detailed instructions for website editors

1. Cloning the website

The first step to start editing the website is to clone the website's main git repository onto your local machine, e.g. using:

git clone https://github.com/tessgi/TessGiWebsite.git

If you are going to make changes to the website, you will need to ask the TESS GI Office to give your GitHub account write permissions to this repository.

2. Installing the dependencies

Compiling the website requires a working environment of either Python 2 or 3 to be installed, e.g. using the Anaconda Python Distribution.

You will also need to ensure that the pelican, markdown, beautifulsoup4, and ghp-import Python packages are installed, e.g. using the pip package installer:

$ pip install pelican markdown beautifulsoup4 ghp-import mdx_include

Note that if markdown is not installed, you will only get a very cryptic warning message ("No valid files found in content.") when compiling the website below.

3. Editing the website

The website content is stored as a collection of text files in the content sub-directory of this repository, which is where all changes must be made.

Most of these content files are formatted using the MarkDown text format (see cheat sheet here), which will automatically be compiled into HTML code using a template (to be explained in step 4). You may also use HTML tags directly in the content files, but this should only be necessary in a small number of cases where very precise control over the layout is required.

Note that the website's template is based on the flatly bootstrap theme. This means that you can use all the html elements and classes which are demonstrated at https://bootswatch.com/flatly. In addition, you can also use all the standard bootstrap css classes.

4. Compiling and previewing the website

After editing the content, you will usually want to preview your changes by compiling the website into HTML format and viewing them in your browser.

The easiest way to do this is to type make devserver in the root of this repository, which will start a local server in the background that will serve the website at http://localhost:8000 (type this address in the url bar of your browser to preview the website). The server is fast and will auto-compile every time you change a content file, however note that it does not create a full version of the front page: you need to perform a full build using make html to preview the front page.

When you are done, you can kill the background server process using make stopserver.

5. Uploading the website

When you are happy with the changes made, you can make them live. This is a 3-step process.

First, make sure you update the repository to include changes others have made (and resolve any conflicts), e.g. using

$ git pull

Second, commit and push your own changes to the KeplerGO git repository so they are available to others. For example, if you changed the Helpdesk page, you would type:

$ git add content/pages/helpdesk.md`
$ git commit -m 'Changed the helpdesk e-mail address'
$ git push

Finally, you can now send the new HTML-compiled version of the website to the dev webserver. This is done by typing make github. Note that it may take up to 5-10 minutes for changes to become visible after make github completed.

Style guide

We want to maintain a consistent style across the website. Rules include

1. Titles should be written in sentence case, not title case (i.e. This is a title, not This is a Title)
2. We refer to ourselves as the TESS Science Support Center.
3. We do not use two spaces after a period.
4. We always use the Oxford comma (i.e. titles are written in sentence case, we use one space after a period, and we use an Oxford comma.)
5. Always use light curve not light curve
6. Capitalization:
   • TESS Guest Investigator program
   • full-frame image
   • TESS Community Science Center
   • Candidate Target List
   • TESS Input Catalog

Makefile tasks

The Makefile provides the following useful commands:

• make html to compile all pages and store them under output/.
• make quick to compile only pages that have changed. This is faster than make html but will cause the front and news pages to be incomplete.
• make devserver to start a development webserver on your local machine at http://localhost:8000, which will auto-compile a page when you make a change. This too causes the frontpage to be empty unless you call make html.
• make github to send the compiled HTML files to the development server.

Note: make quick and make devserver both use agressive caching which allows the website to be built quickly, but causes the listing of news items to be missing from the front page (output/index.html). You need to call make html if you care about a preview of the front page. Calling make github or make live automatically triggers make html.

Authors

This site started off as the Kepler/K2 website, created by Thomas Barclay, Geert Barentsen, and Knicole Colón for the Kepler/K2 Guest Observer Office at NASA Ames.

The TESS GI website is developed and maintained by Thomas Barclay, Knicole Colón, and Rebekah Hounsell at NASA Goddard

Created using the Pelican package and the pelican-bootstrap3 theme.

Citation

You can cite the TESS Science Support Center Website in your publications using its DOI identifier or using the following BibTex code:

@software{tom_barclay_2020_4156283,
  author       = {Tom Barclay and
                  Geert Barentsen and
                  Knicole Colon and
                  Elisa Quintana and
                  Rebekah Hounsell},
  title        = {tessgi/TessGiWebsite: First v2.0 website build},
  month        = oct,
  year         = 2020,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {2.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.4156283},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4156283}
}