brentonk / github-course-starter

Starter files for a Jekyll-based course website to host on GitHub, or elsewhere...

About

This is a template for an academic course website generated using Jekyll, designed in Bootstrap, and compatible with hosting on Github Pages.

A sample course page formatted via this template can be viewed at http://brentonk.github.io/github-course-starter/.

Structure

The template is in the following directories and files. Further explanation of the directory structure is available in the Jekyll documentation. These can, in theory, be left unchanged (except for the base URL in _config.yml, which is site-specific).

• _config.yml: YAML configuration file for Jekyll
• _includes/: snippets that can be reused throughout the site
  • credits_and_license.html: footer text
• _layouts/: HTML layout templates
  • default.html: default layout
  • assignment.md and note.md: layouts for assignments and course notes, respectively
• assets/: CSS stylesheets, fonts, and Javascript code

Your actual course content goes in the following directories and files:

• index.md: course home page in Markdown format
• syllabus.md: syllabus in Markdown format
• _assignments/: a collection containing assignments in Markdown format
• _data/: data files in YAML format
  • course.yml: information about the course
  • instructor.yml: information about the instructor
  • license.yml: (optional) information about the license for course content (e.g., Creative Commons)
• _notes/: a collection containing course notes in Markdown format

Suggested Workflow

1. Fork this repository
2. Alter the template at will (e.g., replace the default Bootstrap CSS file with one of the more attractive options from Bootswatch)
3. Initialize a page for each of your courses by cloning your personal github-course-starter
   1. Leave the tracking branch created by git clone in place, so you can fetch and merge future changes to the template

Issues

• Filenames for notes and assignments must correspond to the order you wish them to appear in the navbar, hence _notes/01-first-note.md, _notes/02-second-note.md, and so on. It is probably possible to change this by including a custom ordering variable in the front matter of each note/assignment.