How to Contribute to this Site
You may have noticed the (above) “Edit me” button on pages of this site. Members of the Hofstra community can submit changes to this site by committing on a new branch of the csc-docs repository and opening a merge request.
To effectively contribute to this site or any other Git repository, you should have a working understanding of Git. If not, it is highly recommended you first read up on Git and version control fundamentals. Anyone not already familiar with Git is free to follow along, but this guide is no substitute for an in-depth understanding and prior experience.
This site is written in Markdown and created with Jekyll, the same system used by Github pages. The docs portion of this site is built on Tom Johnson’s Jekyll Documentation Theme. Likewise, the Hofstra CSS and CS Alumni microsites are also built with Jekyll.
Steps to Making Contributions
Clone the repo
git clone https://git.cs.hofstra.edu/csc/csc-docs.git
cd csc-docs
Start your own branch
git checkout -b <your branch name>
# then set the upstream tracking branch
git push -u origin <your branch name>
For example, if you were going to edit the guide on using Git:
git checkout -b git-guide-edits
git push -u origin git-guide-edits
Add or edit content
Use your preferred text editor to create or edit pages. Place new pages in the pages directory, or an appropiate subdirectory.
All pages of the csc-docs repo are written in Markdown (specifically Kramdown-flavored Markdown), HTML, or a mix thereof. Kramdown mostly aligns with Github-flavored Markdown, but with some additional features and minor differences. Please see the Kramdown quick reference and formatting pages for a listing of features and formatting examples.
Commit your changes
git add pages/guides/git_tutorial.md
git commit -m "added examples to Git tutorial"
git push
Open a merge request
Upon a successful push, you should see a message such as the following:
remote:
remote: To create a merge request for git-guide-edits, visit:
remote: https://git.cs.hofstra.edu/csc/csc-docs/merge_requests/new?merge_request%5Bsource_branch%5D=git-guide-edits
remote:
Go to the provided link to request your commits be merged into master. Once merged into master, your contributions will be published to the live website.
Frontmatter
Each page must have frontmatter at the top such as this:
---
title: Alerts
tags: [guide]
summary: "You can insert notes, tips, warnings, and important alerts in your content."
keywords: notes, tips, cautions, warnings, admonitions
author: First Last <stud1@pride.hofstra.edu>
date_created: 2018-03-15 12:08:48 -0400
last_updated: 2018-08-06 15:58:35 -0400
---
Frontmatter is always formatted with three hyphens at the top and bottom. Your frontmatter must have a title value. All the other values are optional. A comprehensive table of frontmatter variables supported on this site is avalable here.