Campus

Rational

As a teacher, I frequenly share documents with my students, often using Moodle or an other learning platform. Often, students find a small error here or there in a document. While it's easy to quicky fix it, updating the document on the learning platform is often unecessary slow, involving many steps. Updating or adding a document should be an almost immediate process as well.

Campus aims to fix this.

One of the idea of campus is that a filesystem is already used to organize content. Adding an index.md file in each folder is sufficient to specify which files I want to share with my students, and to add a few notes too. The course is also indexed in git, for file versioning. Campus then convert the file hierarchy and index.md files into a static website, which may be hosted on github, gitlab or bitbucket pages...

Every time some content change, calling campus publish is enough to commit changes and update the website online.

Installation

Campus use git, so you must install git first.

Then, to install Campus, execute the following:

$ wget https://github.com/wxgeo/campus/archive/refs/heads/master.zip
$ cd campus-master
$ pip install .

First use

Suppose all the content you want to share is in ~/my-course.

First, you need to initialize this directory:

$ cd ~/my-course
$ campus init

This will do the following: - Make my-course a git repository (if it wasn't already) - Create a ~/my-course/.config folder, with css stylesheets and pictures that you may edit. - Create a ~/my-course/.www folder, which will also be a git repository. Don't edit its content, as everything except .www/.git will be erased and regenerated at every update. - Create an empty ~/my-course/index.md file, which will be your website main entry point.

This an simple example of index.md file:

#Python course for beginners

This course is intended for beginners who wishes to learn the Python programming language. 

[Introduction to Python](intro.pdf)

[Functional programming](func-programming)

The following optional part will introduce you to object oriented programming.

[Object oriented programming](oo-programming)

To generate a website in ~/my-course/.www, just execute:

$ campus make

Then, you'll have to configure both git repositories, ie. ~/my-course and ~/my-course/.www, so that running git push will push your master branch upstream.

For ~/my-course/.www, see github pages, gitlab pages or bitbucket pages documentation to see how to publish a static website.

Usage

Once this has been done, for every content change, you'll now just have to execute:

$ cd ~/my-course
$ campus push

It will automatically call campus make and then push your changes online.