What will we do in this section?

Creating a community-archive web site has lots of technical steps. This quick-start guide for web site creation is an overview that covers many of the eindividual steps in this section

Before you get started

Get to know the files in our example site, which has example items of several different types–photos, document scans, videos–so you don’t have to start from scratch.

Read an overview of the whole publishing process

This page provides a very broad sense of how the individual step-by-step intructions in the “Publishing Your Site” section fit into the larger process.

If you’re comfortable with GitHub already, you can follow the 5 steps below to make a copy of our example site and customize a few things for your community.

If you’re not comfortable with GitHub, the rest of this “Publishing Your Site” section provides an overview of how your site will work, plus step-by-step details for each of the 5 steps here. Focus on Steps 1 and 2 in your first read through so that you can set up your Github account and use it to work with files.

Get to know your _config.yml file

One file in your newly copied web sit controls a lot of the information on the site: _config.yml. You can generate one at https://digitalarcplatform.kalanicraig.com/MakeConfigFile/

A 5-step web-site creation overview

Step 1

Create a new Github.com account

  1. Your Github username should be the name people will search for to find your community. For instance, a community group called “New City Community Archive” would choose the username “newcitycommunityarchive”
  2. The “free” option will mean people can see, but not edit, the files that run your web site.

Step 2

  1. Visit https://github.com/DigitalArcPlatform/template
  2. Press the “Use this template” button
  3. Choose “Create a new repository”
  4. Name your repository yourusername.github.io (where yourusername is the username you chose when you created your Github account)
  5. Set the new repository to be Private

Step 3

The _config.yml file contains settings for exhibit info, font, and color choices that affect the entire web site.

  1. Gather information about your community, that includes
  2. Put these pieces of community info into our “Configuration File Generator” at https://digitalarcplatform.kalanicraig.com/MakeConfigFile/
  3. Open the file that you just downloaded, select the entire contents of the file and use the “copy” command to put that information into your clipboard.
  4. Find the “Code” navigation tab in your new Github repository.
  5. Find the _config.yml from the list of files in your repository. All of the main settings for your site are in this file.
  6. Press the “pencil” button or “edit” button.
  7. Select the entire contents of the _config.yml file and paste over it with the contents of the file you just downloaded.
  8. Scroll down and look for the green “commit” button. Press it to save your configuration file.

Step 4

Each item in the collection has an item ID (no spaces or punctuation) with one or more files associated with it (e.g. 0001.md).

  1. Open the _items folder and look at one of the example items. Get a feel for what you need to gather about each item.
  2. Each item should have its own unique filename.
    • We like YYYY-MM-DD-ItemNo (so the 4th item collected on May 15, 2022, would be 2022-05-15-004)
  3. Each item will have its own information file in the _items folder (2022-05-15-004.md) and a photo in the /assets/items/ folder (2022-05-15-004.jpg or 2022-05-15-004.png).
    • The file for each item in the _items folder has a bunch of information about each item in the first few lines. Each line has a field type (e.g. author), and then a colon, and then the info that goes in that field surrounded by double quotes (author: "Drew H"). You can get more information about what goes in these item fields in the Metadata: Line by Line section of the Theme Docs.

Step 5

  1. Find the “Settings” link on the top-right bar of your repository’s info page
  2. Find the “Pages” link on the left-hand side of your repository’s settings page
  3. Look for a text box with a green or blue background at the top that says “Your site is published” or “Your site is ready to be published”
    • If you see a green box, you’re ready to go. Click on the link!
    • If you see a blue box, wait 5 minutes and reload the page. It should be green now, and you can click on the link.
    • If you don’t see either message, look for the drop-down menu that says “Branch”, choose the “main” branch and press “Save” to publish your site in Github Pages.

Table of contents