Guides for how to perform various updates to this website

Documentation

This site was built using open source (free) software and free hosting. Below you will find a few basic step-by-step guides for making changes to this website. This is not a comprehensive guide for Jekyll, markdown, HTML, or CSS.

For more information on how to use markdown, you can find a helpful syntax guide here. Most updates should be possible with nothing more than markdown. More advanced changes can be applied by someone who has at least a basic understanding of HTML and CSS.

Add Select Board Minutes

  1. Login to GitLab
  2. Navigate to (click on) the HollandVT/Website project.
  3. Cick the Edit button toward the top right of the screen and select Web IDE.
  4. Once the Web IDE page is loaded, use the file navigator on the left-hand side to expand the website folder, then the minutes-and-agendas folder.
  5. Right-click on the select-board folder and select Upload...
  6. Navigate your local files to find the select board document you are trying to upload. It should have a name matching sb minutes mm dd yyyy.pdf like sb minutes 11 20 2023.pdf.
  7. Click on the “source control” icon on the left. It looks like 3 dots with a couple connecting lines and should now have notifications next to it which signifies the number of things you have changed or added.
  8. In the “Commit message” text box, type in a comment that describes what you are adding or changing. This is useful to help track changes to the website over time.
  9. Click the Commit to 'main' button to apply your changes. If prompted to create a new branch, confirm you want to commit these changes to main.

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Add Content to an Existing Page

  1. Login to GitLab
  2. Navigate to (click on) the HollandVT/Website project.
  3. Cick the Edit button toward the top right of the screen and select Web IDE.
  4. Click on pages folder to expand it and locate the page you are looking to edit.
  5. Click on the page you want to edit and it will open in the right-hand pane.
  6. Add or edit the content you need to.
  7. Click on the “source control” icon on the left. It looks like 3 dots with a couple connecting lines and should now have notifications next to it which signifies the number of things you have changed or added.
  8. In the “Commit message” text box, type in a comment that describes what you are adding or changing. This is useful to help track changes to the website over time.
  9. Click the Commit to 'main' button to apply your changes. If prompted to create a new branch, confirm you want to commit these changes to main.

Notes

  • The main page or “homepage” has a special layout compared to other pages and is located one folder deeper at pages-root-folder/index.md. At the time of writing this documentation, this file only contains “front-matter” which is the name of Jekyll page configurations which go between two lines containing ---. You can modify the widgets and call to action link here, or you can add additional content to the page after the second/final --- line.
  • Adding a blank line between two lines of text ensures they will display on their own lines. Otherwise two lines of text get treated like a paragraph and may effectively remove the line return.

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Create a New Post

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Add/Remove a Bulletin Message

  1. Login to GitLab
  2. Navigate to (click on) the HollandVT/Website project.
  3. Cick the Edit button toward the top right of the screen and select Web IDE.
  4. Once the Web IDE page is loaded, use the file navigator on the left-hand side to expand the website folder, then the pages folder and then the pages-root-folder to expand it.
  5. Click on the index.md page and it will open in the right-hand pane.
  6. On line 13 (at the time of this documentation), remove the hashtag (#) before the word message. The presence of this hashtag disables the bulletin, and the absence of the hashtag enables the bulletin.
  7. Replace the text between the quotes with whatever message needs to be delivered to the town.
  8. The level setting is how you set the color of the bulletin. The options are success (green), info (blue-gray), warning (orange), and alert (red).
  9. In most cases you can keep the url set to "/" which disables redirection. If however there is a link you would like to provide for further context, either to another page on this website or to an external page, you can place the link between the quotes in place of the slash.
  10. Click on the “source control” icon on the left. It looks like 3 dots with a couple connecting lines and should now have notifications next to it which signifies the number of things you have changed or added.
  11. In the “Commit message” text box, type in a comment that describes what you are adding or changing. This is useful to help track changes to the website over time.
  12. Click the Commit to 'main' button to apply your changes. If prompted to create a new branch, confirm you want to commit these changes to main.

To disable or remove the bulletin, be sure to add the hashtag (#) back in front of the word message. It’s also a good idea to set the url back to "/" just so an irrelevant link isn’t shared with a future bulletin alert. Apply those changes following the same steps above.

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Create a New Page

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All of the links in the top navigation are configured in the file located at website/_data/navigation.yml. These can be links to other pages on this website, files on this website (such as pdf), or external links to other websites. You can currently find examples of each of these in the navigation file. Additionally, if there are multiple related links, you can organize them into a dropdown list following existing examples in the file.

  1. Login to GitLab
  2. Navigate to (click on) the HollandVT/Website project.
  3. Cick the Edit button toward the top right of the screen and select Web IDE.
  4. Once the Web IDE page is loaded, use the file navigator on the left-hand side to expand the website folder, then the _data folder to expand it.
  5. Click on the navigation.yml page and it will open in the right-hand pane.
  6. Each link has a few attributes and the order in the file from top to bottom becomes the order of the links from left to right in the top navigation bar.
    • If editing an existing link, update the title and url as needed.
    • If creating a new link, create a new block similar to the rest and place it in the order you would like it to appear on the site. The title can be whatever you like. The url can be an external link, file path, or permalink. You can find (or set) the permalink path in the “front-matter” configuration of any page. For example, the recycling page is "/recycling/". That means when someone loads https://hollandvt.gov/recycling/ they get the recycling page. Finally, the side can be either left or right, depending on whether you want the link to display on the left or right side of the navigation bar.

Example new link:

- title: My Cool Link
  url: "/permalink-path/"
  side: left

Notes

  • Proper indentation matters in this file. The easiest way to avoid potential issues here is to simple copy/paste the configuration for an existing link and edit the values accordingly.

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