The Graduate Council (GC) represents the interests of the CS graduate student body at VT both within the department and outside. We provide an interface between the student body and the faculty members, help organize social events among graduate students, and help incoming students become familiar with departmental procedures and activities. Outside the department, we voice student opinions in various graduate school forums and promote social engagements with the wider graduate student community.

To any Graduate students at Virginia Tech interested in aiding the Graduate Council website.

• Please email the mailing list for any non-private issues.
• Please address sensitive questions or concerns to gradcouncil@cs.vt.edu which will be sent only to the current year's E-board members.

There are a couple things you have to do first

1. Sign up to be a part of the organization

Asking a current member to add you.

2. Create an issue and/or pull request
3. Request one of the e-board members for a code review
4. Once it's been accepted, merge and then delete the branch

The new page section below explains how a particular workflow might look (for adding a new page) but most changes to the existing files can be done within your browser.

Once you have been added to the organization (or fork the repository and modify your copy), you can navigate to one of the markdown files that describes the pages (for example to add a new housing recommendation, you would edit housing.md) and in the top right corner of the file, click on the pencil to edit the file directly in your browser. Once you have completed your changes and commit, GitHub will prompt you to create a new branch for your change (we do not allow pushes directly) that you will able to then follow the steps in How can I contribute?

Once your change has been reviewed by and eboard member and merged in, a GitHub action will execute, building an updated version of the website to deploy. However, you will not be able to see your changes reflected on the Grad Council website just yet. There is a crontab that runs every night (around 2:00) that deploys the new version of the website. If you do not see your changes reflected in the website a day after they've been merged in, please raise an issue or contact Grad Council to let us know!

The Grad Council Website is a flat-directory, so all of the web pages are in the main directory, with all of the images or other files in their specified directory. That being said, each markdown is generated "in-place" to it's html result and used in the website.

Assumming you know markdown, you have to do the following to add a new markdown page.

1. In the _config.yml file, locate the main_pages: section.

It should look something like this:

main_pages:
  - url: "/meetings/"
    title: "Contact and Meeting Info"

You should add the relative url and the title inline in the same format. The title will be the text on the sidebar and the relative url will be the hyperlink generated on the sidebar. For the sample page "/temp/" we will use the following section.

main_pages:
  - url: "/meetings/"
    title: "Contact and Meeting Info"
.
.
.
  - url: "/temp/"
    title: "Hello world"

2. Making the file

Create the file using an appropriate name. It has to be a markdown file. In the top section it should include the following specification.

---
layout: page
title: Temp Hello World
permalink: /temp/
---
.
.
.

The layout should always be page, it determines how the page should be rendered to html. The title is the top of the page once the webpage is opened. Finally, the permalink is the relative hyperlink alongside the website. NOTE: the permalink here HAS to match the url in the _config.yml file, otherwise the page won't be reachable.

3. Test your website

Make sure you test your website in your own branch before making a pull request. I simplified this by creating the Makefile and all you have to do is run the cmd make to attempt to generate the website locally.

• Jekyll
• Hyde
• GitHub Actions