Makers Academy Site

Our new-look website, currently viewable at http://www.makersacademy.com.

Why are we open sourcing our website?

Here at Makers Academy we believe in practising what we preach - which means both open-sourcing code wherever possible and writing code that we're proud to showcase to the world. We wanted our new website to be open so people can both see the principles that drive our code, and as a learning tool for students and graduates alike.

Setting up the site locally

• Clone the repo
• Run bundle to install gems
• Create a .env file - you can copy the .env.example file provided as an example to get you started
• Start the server with middleman s
• Go to http://localhost:4567 to view the site in your browser

You'll need to run tests using bundle exec rspec rather than just rspec

Deploying

• Make sure you have submitted a pull request and had it approved following our contributing guidelines
• Merge the pull request into master
• Once our CI server has passed the tests, it will automatically deploy to Github Pages by using the rake publish command provided by the Middleman GitHub pages extension. This builds a Middleman site and pushes the built repo onto a gh-pages branch.

Technologies used

• Ruby as our server side language
• JavaScript/jQuery for client side scripts
• Middleman for compiling our code into a static website we can host on GitHub pages
• RSpec for testing
• Bower for installing shared assets
• Sass to help write our CSS
• Bourbon/Neat/Bitters as a framework for our CSS
• Typekit for typefaces

Adding images

Our images are stored on the makers assets GitHub repo - we've split them out to a seperate repository to keep the size of this repository down. All assets from that repository can be accessed from http://assets.makersacademy.com.

When adding a new image, add it to the images directory of the makers assets GitHub repo, and make sure that the image has been compressed using image optim and are good quality images that fit the look and feel of the site.

Publishing to Bower

We use Bower to share our assets across the various Makers Academy websites. If you need to update the assets here so a newer version can be made available to our other sites, just run rake publish:bower, and enter a semantic versioning number.

The latest SASS changes will be compiled into CSS and a new version of the styles will be published to Bower.

Versioning

We use semantic versioning when creating new releases using tags. This is used both for Bower (see above) and for tracking changes in Mixpanel so we can compare how different versions of the website perform.

A few things to bear in mind:

• If you are only creating a release to update Bower with some style changes, just release a PATCH version
• If you have made a change that is important enough to be tracked in Mixpanel, release a MINOR version or if it's a huge change a MAJOR
• Make sure that when releasing a MAJOR or MINOR version (e.g. upgrading from 2.1.3 to 2.2.0) you:
  1. change in config.rb the website_version number - this number is sent to Mixpanel, please don't forget to do this!
  2. run rake publish:bower with the new version number to ensure that the bower.json file has the correct version