version history

[tavareshugo]

For courses where we want to keep history.

Running some tests with a mixture of github actions and gh releases.

Can try adding this automatically into the _quarto.yml:

    left:
      - text: "Version"
        icon: clock-history
        menu: 
          - text: "2023-01-01"
          - text: "2023-02-01"

[TomSmithCGAT]

Just to check, this would be to maintain the previous course websites in (near) perpetuity? If so, that would be ace!

[tavareshugo]

Note to self for when I get back into this.

If we have a directory in gh-pages with previous versions (let's say the directory is called archive), then it should be possible to:

• git checkout gh-pages archive --> to copy the archive folder from the gh-pages branch into the main. This will avoid having to re-render those past versions or download them from releases.
• need to figure out a way to include the archive into the navbar (see below)
  • might need to add resources: "archive" to copy the whole archive folder, as mentioned here.
• quarto render --> to render a fresh version of the website into _site, including the navbar and archive folder.

Injecting the archive links into the navbar is not completely trivial.

• We want the dropdown to be the same for all versions. I.e. a version from the past should still show all the versions (including current) in the dropdown.
• The relative path to each version's index.html will vary depending on whether we're on the current or past version, which is a bit of a pain.

There are some discussions about this on the quarto repo (search for "quarto version selector in navbar"). One of the suggestions is to use pre-render scripts to create the custom drop down, I guess?