Minima-Scholar

Minima-Scholar is a Jekyll theme for academic websites, enabling simple management and publication of data on team members and publications.

Sources and rationale

Jekyll is a tool for generating websites from simple, easy to write and easy to read text files formatted in Markdown. Jekyll websites can be hosted for free on GitHub Pages and require minimal technical knowledge or effort to maintain.

This theme is a fork from the excellent Jekyll default theme minima designed by Parker Moore. Minima-Scholar introduces some additional features useful for academics and research labs, while striving to remain compatible with future releases of Minima. It is also inspired by some other venerable Jekyll themes such as AcademicPages and Gabriel Alcaras' Academic.

Features

Minima-Scholar behaves mostly like the original Minima and is designed to be fully compatible with GitHub Pages. It moves a step closer than Minima towards the Semantic Web, however, in supporting the schema.org vocabulary wherever feasible. Minima-Scholar supports, out of the box:

  • Team member lists read from schema.org compliant YAML data files (an example file is provided to get you started).
  • Publication lists read from CSL-Yaml files as directly exported from Zotero using the Better BibTeX plugin.

Installation

Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "minima-scholar"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Contents At-A-Glance

This section only covers the features of Minima-Scholar that differ from the original Minima. Refer to the Minima repository for further information.

Layouts

Refers to files within the _layouts directory, that define the markup for your theme.

  • biblio.html — This layout generates a list of bibliographic references from the file _data/biblio.yaml, which is expected to be a CSL-compliant YAML file generated by Zotero and Better BibLaTeX (please let me know if it works with other exporters, or how to make it work with your favorite program). Currently it uses the Chicago format, though others may be added in the future.
  • team.html — This layout outputs a list of team members, in alphabetical order or last names, with links to their ORCID profiles and to their CV (or whatever personal website they might have). It reads data from the _team collection that is compliant with the schema.org specification.
  • page.html — This standard Minima layout has been extended with the addition of Author and Date fields, which will render only when the corresponding front matter information is available. The Author front matter is expected to be structured as follows:
author:
- name: "First Author"
  affiliation: "University 1"
- name: "Second Author"
  affiliation: "Another School"

Includes

Refers to snippets of code within the _includes directory that can be inserted in multiple layouts (and another include-file as well) within the same theme-gem.

  • share.html — Links for sharing page content on various social media.
  • header.html — Defines the site's main header section. This file has been modified from the original Minima version: here, it allows you to use an image instead of your website's title as text.

Plugins

Minima-scholar requires no additional plugins other than those already included by Minima and is fully compatible with the plugin restrictions imposed by GitHub Pages.

Usage

Have the following line in your _config.yml file:

remote_theme: p3palazzo/minima-scholar

Customizing templates

See the Minima README on how to customize the appearance of your website.

This allows you to set which pages you want to appear in the navigation area and configure order of the links.

The default setup in Minima-Scholar is to have navigation links to your lab's about page, to it publications list, and to the list of lab members, in _config.yml:

header_pages:
  - about.md
  - team.md
  - biblio.md

Contributing

Bug reports and feature contributions are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/p3palazzo/minima-scholar.

License

The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.