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Customizing Your Site

Jan 13, 2020

Let’s get rid of what we don’t need

As you look at your site, you’ll notice that there are a lot of things on there that you don’t really need at the moment. Here’s how you turn them off.

  1. Go to your github account, and your academic-kickstart repository.
  2. Go to the content\home directory. The files in this directory are the files that control how the different data are displayed. When your site builds, it checks each of these for a metadata key:value pair, active: true. To turn ‘publications’ off, you edit the publications.md and change active to false. Then when the site builds, it won’t put a publications widget on your front page.
These are the files that control how the different parts of your front page look. Click on the file name, click on the pencil icon to edit, find active: true and change it to active: false.

Customizing the Menu bar

You can change the order or labelling of your menu bar across the top.

  1. Open menu.toml, which is at academic-kickstart/config/_default/menus.toml
  2. The ‘weight’ value is the order. Menu items appear left to right on your site, so if you want something to appear first, give it the lowest weight.
  3. You can also create links to external sites if you want
You probably won’t want to do this at all, but I like to rename ‘posts’ to ‘notebook’.

Themes

This requires moving some files around, adding other bits and bobs and if you really want to do it, we should just sit down together and I’ll talk you through it. But if you’re feeling up to it, here is the official documentation about how to change the theme.