About the theme
This site is based on a jekyll theme by technical writer Tom Joht called documentation-theme-jekyll. At the time of writing this theme was the second most popular documentation-style jekyll theme on jamstackthemes.dev and has been selected for its rich feature set and clean, functional design out of the box.
In addition Tom did a great job documenting the theme (using the theme) and you can read about specific features and their implementation and use in his documentation.
Getting started
To develop the website locally it is recommended to install jekyll and run
bundle exec jekyll serve
The theme’s documentation page has a step-by-step guide to install jekyll and the plugin (“gem”) manager bundler
. When running jekyll for the first time you might have to install and/or update the gems first:
bundle install
bundle update
Now try again bundle exec jekyll serve
and the site should be running at http://localhost:4000/
. Jekyll will refresh and rebuild when you change files.
How documentation-theme-jekyll works in a nutshell
The two main ingredients behind this jekyll theme are
- The sidebar, i.e. the navigation tree. Jekyll builds the sidebar based on the
sidebar.yml
in the_data/sidebars
directory. The YAML contains the relative structure of the navigation tree as well as the links to the html pages. - A set of pages, i.e. Markdown or html files. Jekyll parses the Markdown or html files in the
pages
directory, renders them to html (in case of Markdown), and places them in the root folder.
Sidebar
Here is a snippet from the _data\sidebars\docs_sidebar.yml
that spans (the maximum) two levels:
entries:
- title: sidebar
product: Docs
version: 2.1.0
folders:
- title: Configuration
output: web, pdf
folderitems:
- title: Basics
url: /configuration-introduction.html
output: web, pdf
subfolders:
- title: Coupling Scheme
output: web, pdf
subfolderitems:
- title: Overview
url: /configuration-coupling.html
output: web, pdf
- title: Multi Coupling
url: /configuration-coupling-multi.html
output: web, pdf
- title: Acceleration
url: /configuration-acceleration.html
output: web, pdf
Where to save files
Save Markdown files in the pages
directory in an appropriate subdirectory. Jekyll is agnostic to this folder structure - subdirectories are for human ease of organisation only.
pages
|_ docs
|_ configuration
|_ configuration-introduction.html
|_ ...
|_ installation
|_ ...
Naming conventions
This can be easily achieved by baking in the category/topic into the filename and adds some welcome robustness, e.g.
docs
|_ configuration
|_ configuration-introduction.html
|_ configuration-coupling.html
|_ configuration-coupling-multi.html
File names should contain hyphens -
instead of underscores _
following best practices for SEO.
In addition use the singular form where possible, e.g. configration-action.html
instead of configuration-actions.html
.
Minimal viable frontmatter
The minimal frontmatter contains only the options title
and permalink
(required) but should be complemented by keywords
and summary
(optional).
---
title: Configuration Basics
permalink: configuration-introduction.html
keywords: configuration, basics, overview
summary: "preCICE needs to be configured at runtime via an `xml` file, typically named `precice-config.xml`. Here, you specify which solvers participate in the coupled simulation, which coupling data values they exchange, which numerical methods are used for the data mapping and the fixed-point acceleration and many other things. "
---
The permalink
has to be the full file name ending in .html
with no leading slash \
. During the build process jekyll processes the frontmatter and places the file at permalink
value, i.e. in the root directory (by default is _site
).
The Migration Guide contains more information on how to migrate preCICE documentation pages from the preCICE Github Wiki.
Language & style
As we recently (December 2020) migrated our documentation from multiple sources to this website, you may find different styles and inconsistencies among different pages. However, here is what we aim for:
- Target group: scientists & engineers with some but limited experience with programming and with Linux, but extended experience with simulations.
- Informal style and active voice: imagine you are explaining each concept to a colleague over coffee.
- Concise, yet complete: short pages are completely fine and even preferred, as long as all the important information is there.
- Incomplete/imperfect documentation is better than no documentation: try to contribute anything you can and we can always improve it.
- We use
Sentence case for headings
, notTitle Case for Headings
. The reason is that we find that it is visually clearer, easier to keep it consistent, and we do not need to mix content with style. - Descriptive links: avoid forms such as
you can find the documentation [here](target)
, prefer forms such assee the [documentation](target)
.