Re: [ML] Re: Hosting of gnustep.org

[David Chisnall]

[ Disclaimer: I work for the company that owns GitHub, but these 
opinions are my own and not corporate policy ]

On 18/01/2021 23:36, Ivan Vučica wrote:
> - Should we turn the index into a set of static pages generated from
> MySQL data, which we then check in?
> - If we turn each entry into a single .md file, we can perhaps
> leveragehttps://github.com/allejo/jekyll-toc

There are two things you can do with GitHub Pages:

 - Run a GitHub Action that builds the branch that Pages uses from 
commits to another branch (using whatever static site generator you want).
 - Use GitHub's version of Jekyll to do this transparently.

I generally prefer the latter where possible.  There are some places 
where it doesn't work (for example, if you want to run Doxygen or 
similar to generate API docs on any commit to a header file), but it's 
generally pretty good.

The big downside of using GitHub Pages' version of Jekyll is that you 
can't run arbitrary Jekyll plugins unless they are shipped with the 
GitHub install.  That said, you don't need anything custom to do 
aggregation like this.  Jekyll's support for collections makes it very 
easy to write pages that have summaries and detail both generated from 
the same data (YAML file or Markdown files in a directory with YAML in 
their frontmatter).  I've used this, for example, for open student 
projects on my University web page: each project has a description in a 
.md file with who it's appropriate for, whether it was completed 
already, and so on and these are built into a family of pages with 
navigation links and summaries between them.

Jekyll has some rough corners, but it can generally be battered into the 
right shape for most things.

David