The Basics

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

Check out our example site at https://digitalarcplatform.github.io/demo, which has example items of several different types–photos, document scans, videos–so you don’t have to start from scratch.

The 5 steps below will guide you through making a copy of our example site and customizing it for your community.

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)

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.

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