Boxes got a new website design, including versioned documentation and streamlined navigation.

The changes to the website include:

  • Updated frameworks for better browser support
  • Improved responsive design
  • Versioned documentation: The config file syntax and manual page now feature a version dropdown, where the boxes version can be selected. This will give you the documentation for the exact version of boxes you are using.
  • Better social media support via the Jekyll SEO plugin
  • New looks, but you be the judge of whether it’s better than before
  • Start page has some more relevant info
  • Documentation was sorted to be more easily accessible
  • Internally upgraded from plain CSS to SASS, which helps because we can access values from frameworks and themes using their SASS variables. Also better structure of CSS.

The website can be run on your local machine

Running the website locally is important in order to be able to test changes before they go online. The boxes website is based on Jekyll, GitHub’s lightweight but powerful CMS, and several other open source components.

In order to run the website locally, …

  1. Check the prerequisites:
    • Git
    • Ruby 2.4.4 or higher (Windows Installer, Unix/Linux), needed because Jekyll is a Ruby Gem. Choose the 64bit or the 32bit version depending on your operating system. Always choose a variant that includes DevKit (normally something like Ruby+Devkit 2.4.X (x64)).
    • Make sure Ruby is on the PATH.
  2. gem install bundler
  3. Clone the boxes repo: git clone https://github.com/ascii-boxes/boxes.git
  4. cd boxes
  5. git checkout gh-pages
  6. bundle install
    This command takes care of installing everything else as per the Gemfile.
  7. bundle exec jekyll serve --watch --incremental --trace

Now you can browse the website at http://localhost:4000