Mono Project Website

This repository contains the files used for generating the Mono website.

The site uses Jekyll, a static site generator. GitHub Pages, where the site is hosted, natively supports Jekyll so every time someone pushes to this repository, the website will be built and updated. For hosting it yourself, see Setting up a local copy of the website.

Contributing to the website

Note: Major issues or feature requests should be filed on the issue tracker first, so we can discuss the implications.

If you want to edit a page, the easiest way is to click the link under the page title on the website.

This will open the source file on GitHub where you can click the pencil button to start editing:

GitHub's editor shows you both the Markdown source as well as a preview of the rendered page:

After you've finished your changes, enter a proper summary and description and click the "Propose file change" button to open a pull request:

Setting up a local copy of the website

For larger changes, using the web-based editor on GitHub is not really convenient. A better way is to setup a local copy of the website where you can experiment.

Dependencies

Ruby - Jekyll is written in Ruby
Bundler - a package manager for Ruby. Install it by running gem install bundler

After you've forked and cloned the repository, run the following commands:

bundle install - downloads the required libraries
bundle exec jekyll serve - builds the website and runs a local webserver on port 4000

Note: you can add the --watch option when running jekyll serve to let Jekyll watch for file changes, which means the site will be rebuilt when a file is modified.

Note 2: on case-insensitive file systems like on Windows and Mac OS X you'll run into redirect loops for some URLs. The workaround is to disable redirects locally by removing the gems: jekyll-redirect-from entry from _config.yml.

The site should now be running locally:

Repository structure

_includes - special folder contains snippets that can be included via {% include file.html %} in other pages
_layouts - special folder contains the layouts that are shared between pages. Layouts can be inherited, the root layout is base.html.
_posts - special folder, contains the source pages for the blog section, see Writing a blog post
_site - the output of the generated site is stored here by default, this folder only exists after Jekyll built the site
archived - content that is no longer relevant but kept to keep external links working
community - contains the source pages for the /community website section
css - contains the main stylesheet
docs - contains the source pages for the /docs website section
download - contains the source pages for the /download website section
files - stores binary files used in pages
images - stores the images used in pages
news - lists the blog pages from the _posts directory

Writing a blog post

Blogging is very easy with Jekyll. Simply add a new Markdown file to the _posts folder following the file name convention: YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.md