Rice Solar Physics Group Webpage

Installing Locally

To build and test this website locally, you'll first need to install Jekyll, the static site generator that's used to generate all of the HTML from the Markdown files, and Bundler. If you'd like to autogenerate the publication list, you'll also need to install Python and the ADS package.

To grab the website and start the Jekyll server,

$ git clone https://github.com/rice-solar-physics/group_webpage.git
$ cd group_webpage
$ bundle install
$ bundle exec jekyll serve

Navigate to localhost:4000 in your web browser to see the site. Refresh the page to see your edits. Alternatively, you can edit/add pages as desired just using the GUI tools in the GitHub web app.

Adding Content

You can edit this site by either editing the files directly in the GitHub webapp or cloning the whole repository and editing them locally. Either way, please fork this repository first and then submit a pull request in order to make changes.

Posts

If you'd like to add a post to the "news reel" on the main page, add a file in the _posts/ directory using the naming convention {yyyy}-{mm}-{dd}-{a_short_title}.md. This automatically sets the timestamp of the post. The first several lines of your post must contain the following metadata:

---
layout: post
title: A Title for Your Post
shortnews: true
icon: newspaper-o
---
The content of your post goes here...

If you'd like your post to appear on the front page as a link, set shortnews: false. Set the icon option as any of the Font Awesome icons. If you don't include the shortnews or icon attributes, they will default to false and newspaper-o, respectively.

Then, add any content you'd like using Markdown syntax or vanilla HTML. Currently, this build uses the redcarpet Markdown parser.

People

To add information about a new group member, add an entry to the _data/people.yml. The only required pieces of information are first_name, last_name, and role. role must be one of they keys listed under roles in _config.yml.

Research

To edit any of the research topic pages, make all of the changes in the appropriate Markdown file in the research/ directory. You can write either Markdown or HTML. When adding images, put those in the images/ directory and link to them appropriately.

When adding a new research topic, add a new Markdown file in the research/ directory and it will appear as a card on the "Research" page. Each file should include the following metadata,

---
layout: default
title: A New Research Topic
short_description: Here is a short summary that will show up on the card
people:
  - last_name_of_person_a_working_on_this_project
  - last_name_of_person_b_working_on_this_project
---
The full description of the project should go here...

Other Metadata

To edit any of the information in the other pages (e.g. Software, Resources), please do so in the corresponding YAML file in the _data/ directory. Only edit the files in _pages/ if you'd like to change the actual layout of the page itself. Jekyll uses the liquid templating language to avoid overly verbose Markdown files.

Build Process and Deployment

At every commit to the master branch, a build is triggered on Travis CI, a continuous integration system. During this build, the publication list is generated (via scripts/fetch_pubs.py), Jekyll generates the HTML from the Markdown posts and pages, and the files are copied over to the Rice server where they are visible at solar.rice.edu. Test locally to make sure the build isn't broken before pushing up to master. Otherwise, your changes may not show up. If you're having touble getting the site to build after making your changes, you can inspect the build log on Travis.

Design

Rice Solar Physics research group webpage based on the research group webpage template provided by the UW Sampa group and the UW Sampa group webpage. Some minor modifications made using Twitter Bootstrap.