Open Source Comes to Campus/Logistics/Publicity Website

Typically each event gets its own publicity website (for example, see Wellesley's or Princeton's). For instructions on creating a similar website, read on.

Making the site
To start, you want to make a new organization. This organization should have the name oh-$yourname. For instance, if your school is Hogwarts, you'd make an organization named oh-hogwarts.

The template website lives at the Github repository OH-campus template. You want to make a copy of this site which you can customize. To do so, you want to "fork" the repository. Click the "Fork" button in the top-right corner of the page. You'll be given the option to fork to multiple places - select the organization you just made.

Once the animation concludes, you should be in a new repository in your organizational account (ie at url github.com/oh-hogwarts/oh-campus-template/ rather than github.com/openhatch/oh-campus-template/). You should also see a "forked from..." remark in the top-left.

You now want to rename the site. The naming scheme we'd like you to use is "oh-hogwarts.github.io". This is a naming convention we need to use in order to host the site on github. To rename the repository, go to the righthand sidebar and scroll down to settings, near the bottom. Once you click that, renaming should be the first option you're given.

While you're there, take a look at the option "collaborators" on the lefthand sidebar. It may be useful to add OpenHatch organizers @shaunagm and @paulproteus, as well as any other student organizers who might need access to the site, in case it needs to be updated quickly when you're not available.

Once you've created the repository, send the url to OpenHatch organizers and we'll do our thing. (You can safely ignore that page, but we linked it in case you're interested.)

Customizing the site
You can now go ahead and customize the site. You'll want to make a local copy on your computer, also known as "cloning". To do this:


 * On the right side, look for the clone URL
 * Copy that to the clipboard
 * Open a terminal and type: "git clone " (including the space, but not including the quotation marks)
 * Use your terminal to "paste" the URL in. (Make sure it starts with https unless you have SSH keys set up).
 * Press enter to do the "git clone" operation.

Now you can open your local copy of index.html and style.css in your favorite editor and make changes as you would normally. You can see the changes as you make them by opening index.html in your web browser.

Changes you'll want to make include:
 * Customizing text: adding your school's name in the title element of the header and in the header text on the page, adding information on the date/time and place, adding information about the host organization and contact info for event organizers.
 * Linking to your school's sign up form (see the google doc folder for your event under 'OSCTC Signup Template'). Make sure that the sign up form includes your school's name and not "CHANGEME".
 * Feel free to play with the aesthetics of the site by changing colors, fonts, etc.

Publishing the site
Once you're done making changes you'll want to send them back to your Github repository. To do this, take the following steps:

You can use the following command to get a list of files you've changed:

git status

You can commit your changes by typing "git add" followed by the files you've changed, for instance:

git add index.html

Once you've added the changes, you can "commit" them with a message specifying what you've changed.

git commit -m "Explanation of my changes"

Now, publish those changes on Github by typing:

git push

You will be prompted for your username and password. (If you find constantly entering your username and password annoying, there's an alternate method we can show you called SSH.)

(Alternatively, you may be prompted to set your name and email address. This means you missed a step in setting up git.  No worries, you can set them now.)

You can now visit Github and make sure your repository contains those changes.

If you haven't yet, make sure to tell the OpenHatch organizers what the repository name is. Once you've done that, you should be able to visit $schoolname.openhatch.org (for example, "hogwarts.openhatch.org") and see the site live.

Updating the site
To update the site, you can continue to make changes on your computer and follow the steps in the previous section (status, add, commit, push) to send them to the live site.