Course website

This site serves courses that reside in a git repo consisting of mostly Markdown-formatted text files and any other source files that should be served to the students. Ruby 1.9 with Rails 4.0 is required.

How to install

Clone the application:

git clone [email protected]:uva/course-site.git
bundle install
rake db:schema:load

You can now claim the site by authenticating, and then load the initial content by specifiying a git repository URL that can be cloned.

Alternatively, you can clone the course contents yourself, into the public/course directory:

cd public
git clone <course-url> course

On the source format

• Have a look at https://github.com/uva/uva-prog-physics for information on how to organize your course repository. At the very least, you need a course.yml and a info directory containing subpages for the homepage.

• Numbering the course folders will make sure that they are imported and displayed in order. Any folders besides info that are not numbered will not be imported.

• Small non-markdown files, like images or downloads, will be hosted directly in the public directory and can be referenced using relative links.

• Changing the name of a folder will change the URL of that folder on the website. This will break links from other sites to your course site.

• Changing names and positions of folders and Markdown files should not be a problem for form caching and file submissions already done.

Formatting your pages

• All pages are to be formatted with Markdown and the Kramdown extensions.

• You can use AsciiMath if enclosed within pairs of dollar signs ($$). Check the AsciiMath syntax.

• Add a table of contents to a page using:

    * Table of Contents
    {:toc}
  

  This single bullet item is then replaced with a full table of contents of level 1 and 2 headings.

• Add a content delivery network server by adding a link to it in course.yml:

    cdn: http://cdn.mprog.nl/uva-prog-physics
  

  Then, any link starting with cdn:// will be rewritten to start with that exact cdn url.

• Use videoplayer as the alt text for an image link in order to generate a video player:

    ![videoplayer](cdn://video/lecture001.mp4)
  

Admin configuration options

• Setting a DROPBOX_KEY and DROPBOX_SECRET will allow the admin user to connect their Dropbox account to the course site.

• Setting an COURSESITE_API_TOKEN will allow another website to import some data from a special endpoint.

• Setting a CAS_BASE_URL is needed for authentication. You can optionally set a CAS_FAKE_USER to prevent CAS roundtrips during testing.

• Setting a MAILER_ADDRESS and MAILER_DOMAIN will allow mails to be sent to users.

Some stuff we still want

• Allow the course to be hosted in dropbox.
• Support some other authentication mechanism than CAS only.