Page Set Up

Content pages are written in markdown and can be enhanced using Liquid includes that are packaged with the template. Start by editing the examples or creating new files in the “content” folder.

Each content page will be one file inside the “content” folder of your project. The page stubs have the extension .md (meaning Markdown) and can be organized further into folders inside the “content” folder if desired.

Front Matter

Each content page requires “YAML front matter” at the top of the file. This information is used to configure the page and navigation added to the site’s sidebar.

Use these values:

• title: (required) value will appear as the H1 header at the top of the page and in navigation links.
• nav: (optional) use nav if you would like a value different than the title to appear in the sidebar navigation–this can be helpful if you want to use a shorter title in the nav.
• topics:(optional) will appear as a small feature below the title. These can serve as keywords to help your readers understand the focus of the section.
• description: (optional) will appear as an indented text block below the title. This gives you a chance to summarize the section contents.
• youtubeid: (optional) will add an YouTube video embed at the top of the page. Find the id in the YouTube link. For example, in https://youtu.be/moJgWrD6dwg or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moJgWrD6dwg the youtubeid is moJgWrD6dwg.
• layout: (optional) the default layout for “content” is lesson-content. If you need to create a different style of page, you can manually set the layout to sidebar (still has sidebar nav, but simpler) or page (full width with no sidebar).
• search_exclude: (optional) set to false if you want to exclude the page from the search index.
• noindex: (optional) set to false if you do not want search indexes to crawl the page (this can be done for full site in “_config.yml”).
• anchor_headings: (optional) set to false if you do not want anchor headings on the page (this can be done for full site in “_config.yml”).

The sidebar navigation is set up using further front matter values following these rules:

• Individual listing: To list a page in the nav individually, add nav_order to the front matter of a content page. e.g. nav_order: 1. Do not include section_id or section in the front matter.
• Section dropdown: To create a “section” drop down, on the first content page of the section, add nav_order and section_id to the front matter. The value of section_id will be displayed as the label for the section drop down. e.g. section_id: Workshop Prep. The page’s title will be listed as the first item in the section dropdown.
• Section pages: To add additional pages to the section dropdown, add section and nav_order to the front matter of a markdown file. The value of section must match a section_id set up on another markdown file. The page’s title will appear under the corresponding section dropdown. The pages in the section will sort according to nav_order within the section–however, the page that sets up the section (with section_id) will always be listed first.

Note:

• The nav listings (individual pages and sections) will be sorted by the value of nav_order.
• If a markdown stub does not have nav_order or section in the front matter, the page will not appear anywhere in the navigation. Occasionally you might want to create pages that aren’t linked in the nav, just be sure to link to them from somewhere else!
• The values of section_id / section should be unique. If you create multiple sections with the same name, the nav won’t work as expected!

Example Front Matter

Individual listing:

---
nav_order: 1
title: Introduction
---

Section lead:

---
section_id: Getting Started
nav_order: 3
title: Install Git and GitHub Desktop
---

Section content:

---
section: Getting Started
nav_order: 2
title: Configure Git
---