CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

All contributions from approved CSSS members are welcome.

In order to be able to contribute to the site, you'll need to have Ruby with the Jekyll gem and Git installed on your system.

Cloning the repository for the first time

Simply navigate in the command line to the directory where you'd like to clone the website and type the following:

git clone https://github.com/abejfehr/CSSS.git

This will create a CSSS directory in the folder you're in.

Adding textbooks for the Textbook Trade

I've tried to make it as easy as possible to add/remove/modify textbook information for the textbook trade. The list of textbooks is written in JSON, and can be found in CSSS/textbooktrade/index.html. Simply open that file up in your favorite text editor and find the line that says var textbooks = [.

Between the square brackets([]), you'll find the list of textbooks for sale. You can basically add new ones by pattern matching the existing ones.

All of the fields for each object are as follows:

• title (mandatory): The title of the book
• author (mandatory): The author of the book
• edition (mandatory): The verbal word of the edition. Examples include "Fifth", "Fourth Canadian", etc. The word "Edition" is automatically appended to the end. I should probably make this optional
• course (optional): The course code that uses the book. If not given, it's not displayed in the list
• condition (optional): The condition of the book. Examples include "Good", "New", etc. If not given, it's not displayed in the list
• cover (optional): A URL for the book's cover photo. If not given, a book with a question mark is displayed instead as the cover.
• price (mandatory): The numerical price of a book, rounded to two decimal places(just like cents). Tip: Remember to try your changes locally before submitting. Malformed JSON will prevent the entire list from being rendered, resulting in a page with no textbooks.

Troubleshooting

If the JSON is malformed and the list doesn't appear, check to make sure you're not missing any commas. For example, the following will fail:

[
  {
    title: "Some book"
    author: "Some guy"
  }
  {
    title: "Some other book",
    author: "Some other guy"
  }
]

Between each object({}) and between each property, a comma is needed to separate them.

Similarly, this is another bad example because of too many commas:

[
  {
    title: "Some book",
    author: "Some guy",
  },
  {
    title: "Some other book",
    author: "Some other guy",
  },
]

It's invalid because there's a comma after the last object and the last property. Those don't need commas.

What follows is a well-formed example:

[
  {
    title: "Some book",
    author: "Some guy"
  },
  {
    title: "Some other book",
    author: "Some other guy"
  }
]

Previewing the website locally

You can preview the website at any time by running jekyll serve from the root of the CSSS directory

Publishing your changes

You'll need to "push" these changes for them to become live. This is a several step process.

Tip: At any time, you can type git status to see the current state of affairs, including which branch you're on, what files have been modified, and whether the modified files have been staged or not.

1. Stage that files. This can be done by typing git add <filename> for each individual file or git add --all to stage all modified files.
2. Commit the staged files. This can be done by typing git commit -m "<commit message>".
3. Push the committed changes to the remote. Simply type git push origin gh-pages.

The branch gh-pages is the primary branch for this website, since that's the branch github uses to publish the website publically.