User Guide

Introduction

In addition to a visual overhaul, there are loads of new features just beneath the surface, which serve to improve user experience. While browsing the site, don’t just look at it; click around, and you’ll see these features emerge.

The docs / user manual

To view properly, serve the site to yourself and view the docs rendered. Otherwise, some things won’t display, including the sidebar. For that reason, if you need to read this without serving the site, here are more links the other pages:

• Making New Pages
• Making New Press Releases
• Figures, Tables, Captions
• Image Overlays and Sliders
• Rebuilding
• Rolling Developer’s Notes

Overview

This website uses the static site generator Jekyll. When you want to change something, you’ll need to recompile the website after making changes to the source code. This is ideal because the vast majority of laborous coding can be left to automation. Although this is intended to make it easier to design new pages, you’ll need to know the syntax, which spans six or seven programming languages. It’s easy, I promise.

Important to Understand

The entire project’s root folder is not the same as the site’s root folder. When the entire project is built, the output—which resides in /_site—is the site’s root folder, and contains all content necessary for site operation. Changes to the site are made to the content in the project’s root directory, but http://instrumentation.tamu.edu should point specifically to the _site folder.
To be clear: do not make content alterations within the _site folder—allow it to be populated programmatically. Instead, make your changes/additions to the content in the other folders, which will become built into _site.

Rebuilding the site

After any changes are made, the site must be rebuilt before they will become live. Please follow these instructions.

The Markdown thing

Pages are written as Markdown files (suffix .md), but contain YAML headers, and can contain Markdown or HTML content. Markdown is much easier than HTML, as you’ll soon see.

Markdown Cheatsheet

The language you can learn in 45 seconds. Click here for the cheat-sheet.

Base Theme User Manual

The base theme user manual is available here.