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)
.
Rendering content from external repositories
While the main content of this website is sourced from the same repository that hosts the mechanics of it, some content is sourced from separate repositories. The main reason is to keep the documentation next to the respective code, so that developers can view it without looking at the website and update it in the same contribution, while users can find everything in the same place. Read more about this concept in the preCICE v2 reference paper. This practice is not yet uniformly adopted, but we are working on migrating more content.
External repositories are included as Git submodules, specified in the .gitmodules
file. One example is the tutorias, which is covered by additional documentation for adding new tutorials.
To fetch content from an external repository/project (replace the my-*
with the actual names):
- Specify the new module:
git submodule add https://github.com/precice/my-project imported/my-project
. - Set the branch to track, if not the default:
git submodule set-branch --default my-branch imported/my-project
. This is particularly useful in case you are adding new documentation via a pull request. However, remember to reset the branch after merging. - The above commands should have modified the
.gitmodules
file and staged changes. Commit the result and push. - Update all submodules with
git submodule update --remote --merge
. If successful, you should see your new project in theimported/
directory. - In your GitHub pull request to the website, at the “files changed” view, you should see a submodule with a Git reference to your new project in the
imported/
directory.
To render the fetched content on the website:
- In the file
_config.yml
, specify the newly imported directory in the list ofsubprojects:
. - In the same file, add an entry under the
defaults:
list, associating the subproject with some layout, sidebar, a path for the “Edit me” button, and more features. - Remember to make the new pages discoverable, e.g., by adding them to some sidebar, or linking from another page.
To update the content, push to your repository and then manually trigger the “update submodules” workflow. Alternatively, add a GitHub Actions workflows to your repository, to update the website automatically.