short-course-website

This repo contains the website for the short-course, www.infectiousdiseasemodels.org, refactored in January 2023 to make maintenance a bit easier, and with MS-SQL dependencies removed in August 2023.

Server Configuration

The website is currently deployed on a Windows server, and runs on vanilla PHP with no significant dependencies.

Deployment

• Clone the repo directly into where you would like the page served from. (eg, within an appropriate htdocs folder).

• The server will need write/modify access to this folder for the webhooks to work.

• For the live website, leave the repo on the main branch.

• For the preview website, git checkout preview.

• With the vaultr package installed, and the environment variables VAULT_ADDR and VAULT_AUTH_GITHUB_TOKEN set, run deploy.R in the data folder, to create the db_metadata.php

Editing and Publishing

• Make changes on the preview branch. When you push to that branch, a webhook in this repo will cause those changes to appear on the preview website: https://mrcdata.dide.ic.ac.uk/shortcourse-preview

• When you're happy, make a PR from the latest preview, and merge it, and the live site will be updated.

Dates/costs/basic enabling or disabling of booking:

• Edit the data/metadata.php file. This is (currently) a PHP file, so lines must end with a semicolon.

Presenters

• Edit the data/presenters.json file - a bit fiddly, but perhaps choose a similar person in the list, and copy and paste a section within curly braces, and include the comma after the close-brace unless it is the last entry. The list is sorted by surname. Current conventions:-
  • identifier is unique, containing lower-case letters and underscores
  • title is currently Professor or Dr
  • forenames in the form ['Wes'], or one exception: ['Sir', 'Roy']
  • postnominals for example ['OBE', 'FMedSci']. PhD or lower not included currently.
  • surname is a simple string
  • positions is a list of the main roles, not necessarily exhaustive.
  • descriptopn has some short bio written in the third person.
  • photo - links to a jpg such as images/presenters/p_erson.jpg. Current size is 150x200, or proportional to that.
  • pubs - links to the presenter's personal publications page, usually within https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/.

The timetable

• The first file: timetable_days.csv contains three fields:-

  • no is the day number in order, starting at 1, including 7 and 8 for the weekend.
  • day is the three-lettered day name
  • text is a one-line title, for example Sunday: Maths and Excel refresher day.

• The second file: timetable_slots.csv contains five fields:-

  • day is the numerical day, matching no in the previous file.
  • slot is a numberical slot number - just an ordering of what happens. The timetable hasn't included times so far, which we could change.
  • class is the type of activity, one of practical, break, lunch, qa, lecture or keynote.
  • name is the one-line text for the title of the session.
  • presenter are the presenters, Currently comma-separated, in the form "A. Person, B. Person"

Other text

The remaining text is included in PHP files at present, as it is not expected to change significantly. Should that change, we'll do some more refactoring to make it easier to edit that text without getting stuck into the code for the website. Get in touch, or file issues on the repo to request changes to how editing occurs, or any other aspect of the site.