CauseNet Website

The CauseNet website source code.

Building The Source Code

If you are editing the files directly on GitHub, you can skip this section.

Note: Please use the --recursive flag for git clone or refer to the Update Dependencies section below to initialize or update the needed dependencies before compiling the source code.

The website is built using Jekyll. To install Jekyll on your system, run

sudo apt install ruby ruby-dev build-essential
sudo gem install jekyll jekyll-sitemap

After Jekyll is installed, you can cd into the main folder of this repository and run

jekyll serve

This will start a server at http://localhost:4000/ serving the compiled website. If the source files change, the server will automatically recompile them. The server can be stopped via Ctrl+C.

To publish changes to the source files, just push them to GitHub, which will take care of compiling them on its own. je

Sources Structure

• _includes Includes to other source files (e.g. BibHTML)
• _layouts The website's layout templates
• _maintenance Maintenance scripts
• _sass Sass source files for the website's CSS
• _site Compiled HTML output files (not included in the repository)
• _src_data Source data such as .bib files for generating the BibHTML
• css Main Sass file and additional CSS
• img, fonts, js Image, fonts, and JavaScript files

Other folders not starting with an underscore are content folders containing HTML content files.

Edit HTML

To edit the website's HTML, simply edit the .html content file you want to change. There is nothing special to this, except that you can (!) use Jekyll's Liquid tags and that each source file starts with a YAML front matter. The latter is just a bunch of arbitrary variable definitions, but should at least (but doesn't have to) include the following:

---
layout: default
nav_active: id
title: The page title
description: A meta description
---

The only thing special is nav_active, which determines which entry in the navigation should be highlighted as active. The placeholder id can be any of index, people, lecturenotes, forstudents, research, publications, data, facilities, or events.

If you want an HTML page without any layout, omit layout (or change it to a custom layout which you put in _layouts before).

If you need extra (external) CSS files within a page, specify their paths with

additional_css: [ 'file1.css', 'file2.css', '...' ] 

Edit CSS

CSS is managed via Sass, which is automatically compiled by Jekyll. The main SCSS file is located at css/style.scss. This file is only there to include all other fragments and you hardly ever need to touch it. The fragments themselves are under _sass. Feel free to edit them any way you want, but please do NOT edit anything under _sass/uikit. Any changes there will be overwritten next time UIkit is updated. Instead, if you want to modify the value of a layout variable, look for its name in _sass/uikit/components and redefine it in _sass/_variables.scss.

Linked Assets

Most styles and other web assets are hot-linked from webis-de-assets, a collection of modular Jekyll templates, Sass styles, and other third-party dependencies (UIkit, Fontawesome, jQuery, etc.) for the Webis website theme.

If you add new styles or scripts, please check if they are modular and reusable enough to be added there. Only add them to this repository if they are specific to the causenet.org main website. Please also keep the number of Sass variable redefinitions at the absolute minimum to avoid inconsistencies between websites.