Edit me
Updated 27 Jul 22

So you want to edit the landing page

The preCICE documentation uses the popular Bootstrap 3.4 framework, based on documentation-theme-jekyll. The general idea is to adapt the layout and styling of the original theme as little as possible (‘never change a running system’) and style the landing page index.html relative to the original styling.

Style sheets

The original theme consists (mainly) of

  • customstyles.css: main style sheet
  • theme-blue.css: assembly of color-affecting styles

For the preCICE site these have been adapted to

  • customstyles.css: as before
  • customstyles-precice.css: material changes to the above style sheet
  • theme-precice.css: adaptation of color schemes
  • landing-page: styles specific to the landing page.

Full-bleed layout

Currently the landing uses a full-bleed layout with three different background colours, white (default), light blue and dark blue. The default white (i.e. no background-color set) is implemented through:

<div class="container">
  <div class="section">
    <div class="row">
      <div class="col-lg-12">
        Some content
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

A non-white background is achieve by wrapping the above in <div class="background-light"></div> or <div class="background-dark"></div>.

Bootstrap grid

Let’s further break down the structure of the code example.

<div class="container">       <!-- Bootstrap grid -->
  <div class="section">
    <div class="row">         <!-- Bootstrap grid -->
      <div class="col-lg-12"> <!-- Bootstrap grid -->
        Some content
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

The highlighted classes implement the Bootstrap grid whereas .section is a custom style. As a quick visual example, when the following .rows are placed in .container we have a number of .col-X-Y column classes available, where X targets the viewport and Y denotes width from 1-12. For more information see the Bootstrap docs.

Code:

<div class="row">
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
  <div class="col-md-1">.col-md-1</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
  <div class="col-md-8">.col-md-8</div>
  <div class="col-md-4">.col-md-4</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
  <div class="col-md-4">.col-md-4</div>
  <div class="col-md-4">.col-md-4</div>
  <div class="col-md-4">.col-md-4</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
  <div class="col-md-6">.col-md-6</div>
  <div class="col-md-6">.col-md-6</div>
</div>

Output:

.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-1
.col-md-8
.col-md-4
.col-md-4
.col-md-4
.col-md-4
.col-md-6
.col-md-6

Typical example

In the case of the landing page a typical example looks like this:

<div class="background-light">
  <div class="container">
    <div class="section">

      <div class="row">
        <div class="col-lg-12">
          <h2 class="section-header">A new section that wasn't there before</h2>
        </div>
      </div>

      <div class="row">
        <div class="col-md-4 col-sm-6">
        </div>
        <div class="col-md-4 col-sm-6">
        </div>
        <div class="col-md-4 col-sm-6">
        </div>
      </div>

      <div class="row">
        <div class="col-lg-12">
          <a href="#" class="btn btn-primary no-icon" role="button">Link &nbsp;<i class="fas fa-chevron-right"></i></a>
        </div>
      </div>

    </div> <!-- section -->
  </div> <!-- container -->
</div> <!-- background-light -->

This proto-example of

  1. a section header,
  2. some content, and a
  3. concluding link

consists of a separate .row for each of the three elements, followed by one or more .col-X-Y that make up a total width of 12.