SOC-DRaH webpage

[ktoddbrown]

Investigate https://rstudio.github.io/distill/website.html to create a webpage front for this repo.

[ktoddbrown]

Decided to go with a bookdown solution for now so that we can create chapter report outs for each data contribution. Note entirely pleased with this solution because it leaves the index.Rmd dangling in the primary directory but the other work arounds seem worse. @bpbond Do you have thoughts here? e5a0322

[bpbond]

Hi @ktoddbrown

We use pkgdown to build the Hector website; my colleagues @ashiklom and @kdorheim were the ones who set up and refined it, respectively, and they may have thoughts. I've used bookdown for long-form Rmarkdown work but not for websites.

[ktoddbrown]

I couldn't figure out how to use pkgdown for data set reports but we might be able to use the manual structure that you have set up there for Hector. Interesting... I'm not wed to bookdown and am not quite happy with some of the imposted structures.

[ashiklom]

pkgdown excels at building websites for R packages. Using it for something more flexible can be a bit tricky. But, since this repo already has an R package format, it could be a good choice.

We made the Hector site a while ago, so the details are hazy, but as I recall, the trick to getting arbitrary documentation in there was to keep everything in (subdirectories of) the vignettes folder and realizing that, in the resulting HTML file structure, vignettes is converted to articles but everything else stays the same. For example, here's the relevant part of our Hector _pkgdown.yml:

https://github.com/JGCRI/hector/blob/master/_pkgdown.yml#L6-L15

Also, as an alternative to bookdown, you might consider blogdown. I haven't played with it myself, but it seems popular (maybe even more than bookdown) among the serious R people I follow on Twitter.

[kdorheim]

@ashiklom is way knowledgeable than me on this subject. I haven't worked with bookdown, but have used pkgdown and attempted to use blogdown once but failed to figure out how to host it on a github site 🤷