This article is now outdated. Please refer to the Grav Course Companion Getting Started Guide.
I am pleased (well, actually quite stoked) to announce that my ready-to-run Course Companion, built with the open source CMS Grav, is now available for fellow educators to take for a test drive.
Figure 1. Grav course companion screenshot. Explore the early release online at demo.hibbittsdesign.org/grav-course-companion-bv/
This Course Companion is designed to accompany a face-to-face, blended or fully online university course. It also supports a flipped-LMS approach using the modern flat-file CMS Grav as an open and collaborative Web platform.
As an open source modern flat-file CMS, Grav offers a distinct set of advantages to Web-savvy educators looking to move beyond their institutional LMS:
Pre-flight Checklist
Installation Steps
With the flat-file (no database) nature of Grav, there are lots of benefits of installing Grav on your computer and then having your site files mirrored onto a Web server:
Figure 2. Grav recommended install using Grav, GitHub, and Deploy to support a flipped-LMS approach.
Pre-flight Checklist
Desktop Installation Steps
Once you have confirmed that Grav is running locally on your computer, the final step is to create a Git server repository to store your site files and setup an automatic deployment service to push any changed files to your Web server. An example step-by-step walkthrough this process is available in the article Using Grav with GitHub Desktop (and Deploy).
If you are new to Grav, you might find these in-progress workshop slides helpful:
/user
- /pages
- /01.blog | blog.html.twig and blog_item.html.twig
-/_important-reminders | important_reminders.html.twig
-/_preparations | preparations.html.twig
-/week-01 | item.html.twig
-/week-02 | item.html.twig
- etc..
- /02.resources | page.html.twig
-/page.md
- /03.syllabus | page.html.twig
-/page.md
- /sidebar | sidebar.html.twig
-/sidebar.md
- /footer | default.html.twig (Course Companion Bones Vanilla theme element)
-/default.md
- /logo | default.html.twig (Course Companion Bones Vanilla theme element)
-/default.md
- /mobilemenu | default.html.twig (Course Companion Bones Vanilla theme element)
-/default.md
The ‘site.yaml’ file located in the ‘/user/config/’ folder contains the following default values:
title: CPT-363
metadata:
description: 'A short description of your course would go here'
displaymenuentries:
enabled: false # display of additional menu entries
menu: # menu entry for adding external sites/tools
- text: Grav
icon: arrow-circle-right
url: http://getgrav.org/
icon: # default font awesome icons for preparation and post entries
preparations: check-circle
posts: calendar-o
github:
location: none # menu | page | none
tree: https://github.com/hibbitts-design/grav-skeleton-course-companion-bv/edit/master/
rssbutton:
display: true
Setting | Child Setting | Description |
---|---|---|
title | The course number/id, to be displayed at the top of every page. | |
metadata | description | The short description of the course companion site |
displaymenuentries | enabled | Can be set to true or false . When set to true , all defined menu items are added to the navbar. |
menu | text | Text label for external links to be included on navbar |
menu | icon | Font awesome icon code for external link (optional) |
menu | url | URL for external link |
icon | preparations | Change the default font awesome icon for the preparation area on the home page. |
icon | posts | Change the default font awesome icon for the weekly blog posts (i.e. weekly summaries). |
rssbutton | display | Can be set to true or false . When set to true , it displays RSS buttons on the sidebar for each page. |
github | enabled | Can be set to true or false . When set to true , it generates the Edit this page link to GitHub for each page. |
github | tree | Sets the tree by which your site’s content is based. Generally the repo your site’s content is pulled from. |
How do you create a new page?
The recommended method is to copy an existing page (such as’Resources’) using either the Admin Panel or if working directly with files copy the page folder ‘resources’ and then add the numeric prefix (e.g. ‘04.’). Once an existing page has been copied then modify as needed.
What is an ‘early release’?
As part of a highly iterative development process, early versions of the Course Companion will be made available for evaluation and comment. These releases are believed to be free of major bugs, however they are still works-in-progress.
Questions or comments? You can find me on Twitter at @hibbittsdesign.
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