LIS website

Source for the Learning & Intelligent Systems Group website, built with Hugo. It is a fully static site: content lives in Markdown and YAML files, there is no JavaScript build step and no npm, and every PR gets a preview link.

Want to add yourself, a blog post, or a publication? See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Local development

Install Hugo (a single binary: brew install hugo, sudo snap install hugo, or a download from the releases page). The templates work with Hugo 0.92 and newer; CI uses the version pinned in .github/workflows/ci.yml.

hugo server -D     # http://localhost:1313, live reload, drafts visible
hugo               # production build into public/ (drafts hidden)

Layout

config.toml              site settings
content/                 pages; folder structure = URL structure
  _index.md              home page intro text
  blog/                  one folder per post (index.md + images)
  people.md, publications.md
assets/
  people/                one YAML file + photo per person
  publications.yaml      all publications
  css/main.css           colour tokens, typography, and all component styles
layouts/                 HTML templates (Hugo/Go templates)
  _default/baseof.html   page shell; people.html and publications.html are those pages
  blog/                  blog list, post page, RSS feed (/blog/rss.xml)
  partials/              header, footer, cards, publication entry, people lookup
  research/              templates for the on-hold research section
archetypes/              templates for `hugo new content`
static/                  copied as-is: logos, favicon, fonts, blog videos (static/media/)
research-on-hold/        project pages, not built yet (see its README)

Images in assets/people and blog covers are resized by Hugo at build time. Old WordPress blog URLs redirect to the new ones through the aliases field in each post.

CI and deployment

Workflow	Trigger	What it does
ci.yml	every PR and push to main	image size check, hugo build (fails on bad people ids, roles or fields)
pr-preview.yml	PRs	builds with drafts visible and publishes to GitHub Pages under /pr-preview/pr-N/; removed when the PR closes

Deployment: the CSAIL web servers build this repository with Hugo and serve the result, so merging to main is all it takes.

One-time setup:

1. Previews: Settings → Pages → Source "Deploy from a branch", branch gh-pages / root. The gh-pages branch is created by the first preview run.
2. Review: protect main (require a PR, a passing CI check, and one approval). Optionally add a CODEOWNERS file.

Fonts: headings use Jost, a free font close to the Futura used on the old WordPress theme. Jost and Open Sans are self-hosted from static/fonts/.