Just the Class

Just the Class is a GitHub Pages template developed for the purpose of quickly deploying course websites. In addition to serving plain web pages and files, it provides a boilerplate for:

• a course calendar,
• a staff page,
• and a weekly schedule.

Just the Class is a set of customizations on top of the popular Just the Docs theme, which provides a robust and thoroughly-tested foundation that makes it easy to extend for your own special use cases. These foundational features include:

• automatic navigation structure,
• instant, full-text search and page indexing,
• and a small but powerful set of UI components and authoring utilities.

Getting Started

Getting started with Just the Class is simple.

1. Create a new repository based on Just the Class.
2. Update _config.yml and index.md with your course information.
3. Configure a publishing source for GitHub Pages. Your course website is now live!
4. Edit and create .md Markdown files to add your content.

Just the Class has been used by instructors at Stanford University (CS 161), UC Berkeley (Data 100), UC Santa Barbara (DS1), Northeastern University (CS4530/5500), and Carnegie Mellon University (17-450/17-950). For a few open-source examples, see the following course websites and their source code.

• CSE 390HA (source code) is an example of a single-page website that centers modules.
• CSE 143 (source code) hosts an entire online textbook with full-text search.
• CSE 373 (source code) is an example of a simple website combining Markdown pages with generated HTML files.

Share your course website and find more examples in the show and tell discussion!

Continue reading to learn how to setup a development environment on your local computer. This allows you to make incremental changes without directly modifying the live website.

Local development environment

Just the Class is built for Jekyll, a static site generator. View the quick start guide for more information. Just the Docs requires no special Jekyll plugins and can run on GitHub Pages' standard Jekyll compiler.

1. Follow the GitHub documentation for Setting up your GitHub Pages site locally with Jekyll.
2. Start your local Jekyll server.

$ bundle exec jekyll serve

1. Point your web browser to http://localhost:4000
2. Reload your web browser after making a change to preview its effect.

For more information, refer to Just the Docs.