Create digital.arizona.edu with static site generator

[camikazegreen]

Motivation

We hope for digital.arizona.edu to be the home of technical documentation for all things Arizona Digital. As that site grows, it would be very helpful that have a site generator to manage the navigation.

Proposed Resolution

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like to be able to maintain the navigation in one place and have it updated on all pages of the site.

[mmunro-ltrr]

Choice of static site generator

Hugo

Positives

• Hugo already builds the copy of the Arizona Bootstrap documentation hosted in this repository.
• The software itself would be a currently favored choice for many sites, so it would be good to demonstrate its use in another Arizona Digital context.
• Easy to set up for local development.

Negatives

• There's no overlap between the Arizona Bootstrap documentation and the general digital.arizona.edu content; there have to be two distinct Hugo configurations (perhaps fighting over a common directory subtree) or a combined configuration that can't re-use the one building the primary copy of the Arizona Bootstrap documentation.

Jekyll

Positives

• Still promoted by many GitHub documents as the static site generator to use there.
• Some prior experience from when it built the Bootstrap documentation.

Negatives

• Not the recommended choice as a static site builder for University sites.

• Setting up for local development is complicated.

Gatsby

Positives

• Extensive experience from the Admissions project (arizona-gatsby).
• It would be good to provide an Arizona-themed Gatsby example using local files, without a Drupal backend.
• Several people are already set up with appropriate local development environments.

Negatives

• Over-complicated for just a few pages?

  Won't fix (keep manually generated static HTML files).

Positives

• Good to have an example of how to style a couple of hand-crafted HTML pages.

Negatives

• More maintenance work in the long term.
• Does not scale to adding much content.

• This issue!

Recommendation

Use Gatsby.

Background

Currently, GitHub is serving the files on the main branch in the docs subdirectory directly as https://digital.arizona.edu/ (defined in the Pages repository setting). Arizona Bootstrap updates trigger a rebuild of the docs/arizona-bootstrap subtree via repository_dispatch and the .github/workflows/release.yml Action. The docs/ua-bootstrap subtree is very old, and seemingly unused here, although the link https://digital.arizona.edu/ua-bootstrap/ does work (the link on the main page is to http://uadigital.arizona.edu/ua-bootstrap/ instead, a slightly more recent version).