Website content guide — Sister City

Overview

This is an instructional guide to help you make edits to text content on the Sister City website. 

The website frontend is a powered by a complex JavaScript application called Vue. You don’t need to know much about Vue; only that you probably don’t want to be mucking around in its files regularly. Project scope didn’t allow for a dedicated graphical content management system, but we didn’t want to leave you out in the cold, so we’ve created a very simple way for you to edit some site text.

What you need

To get started, you’ll need a rudimentary understanding of GitHub and a way to edit text files.

  • Permission to access to the Sister City repository
  • A text editor, like Sublime Text — or just use the GitHub text editor

It’s beyond the scope of this document to give a full GitHub tutorial. The short of it is that GitHub is a version control service for code. Developers like to keep versions of code so they can “roll back” to a previous version if something goes wrong. Check out the GitHub guides if you’re just starting out.

Organizations have different ways of working in GitHub; you’ll need to work with your development team to figure out your workflow. We suggest something like this:

  • Create a new branch for your work. Don’t work on master. Use your initials in the branch name, so it’s easy to identify who’s working on what, e.g. FD-content-edits.
  • Make the edits you need to make.
  • Commit your changes frequently, with brief, useful messages. Other folks read these!
  • When you're done, create a pull request. This tells other developers on the project that you think your work is ready to be merged into master.
  • Someone else in your organization should review the pull request. They can approve it, or request changes.
  • When your pull request is approved, merge it to master. Once it’s merged, you can delete the branch you were working on — you don’t need it anymore.

What can be edited, and what can’t (easily)

You will be able to edit:

  • 404 page
  • All the text in the Info view (“Something Else”), like About, Food & drink, FAQ, and so on
  • Hotel manual
  • Your stay and Requests menu text
  • Rooms details text and slideshow

Like we said, the website frontend is powered by a JavaScript application. There’s a lot of text, mostly interface text and some error messages, that won’t be easily editable by the layperson. But nothing’s impossible, and a developer on your team should be able to help you make a change to something if it becomes necessary.

You’ll need a developer’s help to find, edit, or otherwise modify things like:

  • Interface text, like buttons, form labels, and page headers and introductions
  • Items in the requests list
  • Error messages

File locations

The files are hosted on a web server, and we manage their versions in a GitHub repository (repo). Once you’ve got a local version of the site up and running, you’ll be able to navigate the site’s backend directory structure using Finder. 

All of the files you’ll want to edit are in the  src > assets > data directory. If you need to change something that isn’t in there, ask a developer for help. Trust us, you really do not want to poke around in those other files.

The files are named in a way that should make it pretty clear what’s what. Here’s a rundown.

  • 404.md — The 404, File not found page is where folks end up if they access a bad link.
Info ("Something Else")