At TechLabs Berlin, we use the Semester Radar to present the semester to the students as a comprehensive timeline of events and milestones. It is always referred to as the main source for event details.
The Radar is a NuxtJS application, rendered as a static site. All it's content is based on simple text files (.yaml format) located within this repository, which is converted into simple HTML files during the build process. The application is built by GitHub Actions and hosted on GitHub Pages.
The main items in the Radar are: the Timeline, the Events, and the Milestones:
- Timeline: shows the whole semester at a glance; divided in weeks, gives an overview of events and milestones each week
- Events: weekly events happening throuhgout the semester; each event can have resources attached to it (meeting room link, slides, event recordings, etc)
- Milestones: are deadlines for the students throughout the semester; they can include to-dos that the student has to complete by a certain date
All Events and Milestones have their own pages, accessible by either clicking on their titles or on their names within the Timeline. This allows for sending out links to specific events and milestones to the students, when necessary.
Additionally, there are also other secondary pages displayed when clicking on the hamburger menu on top right: FAQ, Media, and Newsletter.
While the Radar is a very simple application, is does require some initial configuration and some knowledge of Git and JavaScript. If you'd like to use the radar, start by cloning this repo locally and configuring it to your location.
Once you clone the repo locally, you can start the dev server with hot reloading, and see the changes live on your browser:
# install dependencies
$ npm install
# serve with hot reload at localhost:3000
$ npm run devThese are the main parts that need to be configured/modified:
The title which appears on the browser title window can be changed in /nuxt.config.js, under head: titleTemplate. The term name, appearing on the top of the page, can be edited in the file content/term.yaml.
For the location badge, you can replace static/icon-location.png with the badge of your location
The top menu (hamburger) is composed of internal links to other pages and social icons leading to our social media pages.
- Internal links: you can modify the links in the file
content/nav-links.yaml - Social links: you can modify the links in the file
content/social-links.yaml
We use a personalized AWS Lambda function endpoint in our newsletter form, connected to out Mailchimp account. You'll need to create your own, and change the endpoint on the file content/newsletter.yaml.
The footer contents can be changed in the file content/footer.yaml.
All content in the Radar is written on YAML files. YAML (a recursive acronym for "YAML Ain't Markup Language") is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. In simple terms, it is a text file that allows structure data.
The content files are located in the folder /content. You can edit any of these files and see the changes in real time in you local dev environment. To publish content changes, you'd have to simply git commit and git push to your repo, so that the action to rebuild and redeploying the content is fired.
There are three main pieces of content you'll be working with: the Timeline, the Events, and the Milestones.
By editing the file /content/timeline.yaml, you define the main sections within the timeline. The weeks in each section are populated automatically from the start and end dates. The files is a collection of items under timeline:, which contain the following properties:
| property | description | example | required | default |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| title|the title of the timeline section|Academic Phase|yes|-|
| description|the description of the timeline section, shown when hovering over the (?) icon next to the section title|(see below)|yes|-|
| startDate|the section's starting date (Monday), in the format YYY/MM/DD |2021/05/17|yes|-|
| endDate|the section's ending date (Sunday), in the format YYY/MM/DD |2021/07/04|yes|-|
For example:
- title: Project Phase
description: |
This is prime time! You imagine and implement a prototype in a project of your own.
You team up as a group of 4-6 Techies and work together to create something big. Experienced mentors will be on your side for support.
startDate: 2021/05/17
endDate: 2021/07/04... will result in:
The Events and Milestones are then placed automatically within their respective weeks on the Timeline.
Inside the /content/events folder, you'll find files to all the events in the semester. They all follow a similar structure:
# install dependencies
$ npm install
# serve with hot reload at localhost:3000
$ npm run dev
# build for production and launch server
$ npm run build
$ npm run start
# generate static project
$ npm run generateFor detailed explanation on how things work, check out Nuxt.js docs.