course-site-quarto-lite

This repository contains a minimal Quarto-based template for class website. You can see a preview of it at https://berkeley-cdss.github.io/course-site-quarto-lite. This template is intended to be forked and altered for other courses.

For instructors: please see these instructions in the section below on how to use this repository.

Capabilities of this Quarto-based Template

• Create a basic class website by modifying content online at github.com or in a GitHub repository.

Instructions for Course Staff

Basic Instructions

1. In some units, course staff may create the repositories for you, while in others, department will do that and will then notify you that the class repository is ready. Afterwards, go to the GitHub site for the class, e.g., https://github.com/berkeley-stat999/fall-2024.

2. Begin making changes relevant to your course. To edit a file, you can click on a file, then on the edit icon in the upper right and then on Commit changes in the upper right when you want to save your changes. In the dialog box that pops up, also simply click on Commit changes in the box.

   • If desired, modify the site's metadata and table of contents in _quarto.yml to reflect the pages you want on the site. You may choose to add or remove files (each file having the conent for a separate page).
   • Edit the various Quarto Markdown (qmd) files: index.qmd (the home page), staff.qmd (information on staff), and syllabus.qmd with the content you want. You can use simple Markdown formatting, which will hopefully be easy to do by example even if you're not familiar with Markdown.
   • Edit _variables.yml to replace the generic department, number, and semester information with the actual information for your course.
   • Edit the buttons.yml file to modify the buttons shown at the top of the home page (or remove the syntax related to buttons in index.qmd if you don't want buttons).
   • Update README.md to remove these instructions and include basic text referring to your actual class number (see section at bottom of this document for template text).
   • Check the license assigned to the materials posted on the site (by default CC-BY) in license.qmd to make sure you are comfortable with it. You're welcome to choose another license that you prefer. If you'd like to not allow commercial use, you might choose CC-BY-NC. You might also consider not allowing derivative works, for example by choosing CC-BY-ND or CC-BY-NC-ND, as chosen for Data 8, but note that this license can make it hard for others to use the material in part or to build upon it.

3. We've configured the site so that when you commit changes, some processing gets done remotely to update the website. Please contact us if you notice any problems.

More Advanced (Git-Based) Instructions

These instructions have been tested under MacOS.

1. Install Quarto for Mac, Windows, or Linux.

2. Install Git if you don't have it installed.

3. In some units, course staff may create the repositories for you, while in others, department will do that and will then notify you that the class repository is ready. Afterwards, clone it into a local working directory on your computer. For the purposes of these instructions, we'll pretend your repository is at https://github.com/berkeley-stat555/fall-2024.

   • You can do this from the terminal/commandline or within a Git graphical application (e.g., GitHub Desktop).
   • From the terminal it would look like this:

     git clone https://github.com/berkeley-stat555/fall-2024
     cd fall-2024

   If you need to maintain several of these websites and there is a conflict in working directory names, you can just rename the working directory after cloning it, e.g. mv fall-2024 stat555-fall-2024; cd stat555-fall-2024.

4. Begin making changes relevant to your course. As described in the previous section.

5. Update your repository with the changes to your source files. First tell git about all files that should be in your repo.

   git add NEWFILE1.md NEWFILE2.md NEWDIRECTORY

   Then commit your changes:

   git commit -m "Initial checkin for Stat 555."

   If you modify an existing file, you can either do git add currentfile.md or include the -a flag when you run git commit to automatically update files that Git is already keeping track of, e.g., after modifying unit 7 files, git commit -am "Updated Unit 7".

6. Push your changed to GitHub (you might choose to wait to do this until after previewing the site, discussed in the next section).

   git push

Instructions for Department Staff

In addition to standard SCF instructions for setting up the GitHub organization, course overview, and DNS, staff will need to

1. Fork this course-lite-quarto-lite repository template:

   a. Visit https://github.com/berkeley-cdss/course-site-quarto-lite.

   b. Above the file list click Use this template and then Create a new repository. This will then bring you to a screen where you'll configure the new repository.

   c. Do not enable the Include all branches checkbox.

   d. Name the repository after academic term, e.g. fall-2024 and place it into the per-course organization, e.g. berkeley-statNNN. This may vary by department.

   f. Click on Create Repository.

2. Clone the repository and run quarto publish gh-pages. This will set up the gh-pages branch and activate the GitHub Pages site. Once that is done, commits made from github.com/berkeley-statXYZ/fall-2024 will trigger rendering and building the site via GitHub Actions.

3. Create an empty gh-pages branch:

      git checkout --orphan gh-pages
      git reset --hard # make sure all changes are committed before running this!
      git commit --allow-empty -m "Initialising gh-pages branch"
      git push origin gh-pages
      git checkout main

4. Make a few changes to instantiated content.

   a. In _quarto.yml, change "999" to the actual course number. Also add website.google-analytics based on the ga_tracking value in the course overview repository's _config.yml.

   b. In index.qmd, change "999" to the actual course number in the title. Also change the term in the subtitle.

   c. In syllabus.qmd, change "999" to the actual course number in the table of contents and headings. Also set the course description in the title based on that in the course overview repository.

   Then commit and push changes. This will trigger a GitHub Actions workflow that will render and publish the site.

5. Enable course staff to modify the repo.

   a. Create a team in the course organization. Go to https://github.com/orgs/berkeley-statXYZ/teams and create a team of the form instructors-fall-2024. The visibility and notifications settings can be left as default.

   b. Invite one or more course staff to the team.

   c. Enable the team to manage the new repo. Visit https://github.com/berkeley-statXYZ/fall-2024/settings/access choose "Add teams". Type the previously created team name and set the role to Maintain. This lets the team members do most things other than managing security or deleting the repo.

README Content for Actual Class Repositories

This is the repository for the course website and course material for Department XYZ for Fall 2024. The website for which this content is the source materials is available at <https://{course hostname}/fall-2024>.