MonoDevelop Website

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

Architecture

The site is made with Jekyll, an open source 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:

1. bundle install - downloads the required libraries
2. 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 macOS 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.
• _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
• css - contains the main stylesheet
• developers - contains the source pages for the /developers website section
• documentation - contains the source pages for the /documentation website section
• download - contains the source pages for the /download website section
• help - contains the source pages for the /help website section
• images - stores the images used in pages
• screenshots - contains the source pages for the /screenshots website section