13.5 Updating the Website

Go to \\admin2\instres\reporting_website and open reporting_website.Rproj with R Studio.

Figure 13.12: Internal Website Rproj File

13.5.1 Update an Existing Page

Updating an existing webpage requires that you modify the R MArkdown document that generated this. This is as simple as finding the associated Rmd document and making your updates and using the above mentioned makefile (See Section 13.4.8).

As an example, navigate to the .Rmd file that you wish to update (e.g. if you want to update the “studies” webpage go to the “studies.Rmd” document. Open this in R Studio.

Figure 13.13: Existing Internal Website Webpage Rmd

You will then see the following code in the viewing pane:

Figure 13.14: Current Internal Studies Webpage Code

If you then wanted to modify the existing link for the “College Scorecard Analysis of Student Debt” you could just change the associated web address. Recall that web addresses take the for of:

[Link Name](www.yourlinkhere.com)

As a reminder, the above code will render to the webpage pictured in Figure 13.15.

Figure 13.15: Current Internal Studies Webpage

If we wanted to add another webpage, we could do so by modifying the code:

Figure 13.16: Modified Internal Studies Webpage Code

After we have made all of the necessary modifications, we would go to the terminal in R Studio and type make and press enter. A window in the browser will open showing the entire internal website with the modifications that were made. If you are happy with the modification, then close the browser and return to the terminal. In the terminal type make update and the modifications will be pushed to the server.

13.5.2 Create a New Page

If you want to create a new webpage, you will need to again, need to open the .Rproj file in \\admin2\instres\reporting_website with R Studio as shown in Figure 13.12.

You will then need to create a R Markdown document in order to have the new page. A new R Markdown document can be created by selecting the new document command in R Studio as shown in Figure 13.17

Figure 13.17: Select New R Markdown Document

You will then be prompted to select the R Markdown document type and enter some information. At this point just select OK (see Figure 13.18).

Figure 13.18: Select OK to Create New R Markdown Document

We will modify the R Markdown document directly. After selecting OK, a new document will appear in your window with some generic template information (See Figure 13.19).

Figure 13.19: R Markdown Initial Template

Feel free to read this information. My general practice is to delete all of the text, and remove the unnecessary components from the yaml heading as pictured in Figure 13.20.

Figure 13.20: Example Starting New Webpage R Markdown Document

You can then begin generating content. Once finished, save the Rmd file with a name.

Remember whatever you name the R Markdown Document will be the name of the html file!

You can then use the make command in the terminal as described in Section 13.4.8 to make and the make update to push your new webpage to the server.

Right now, the file will exist as a valid webpage. If you would like to include the new webpage on the navigation bar, you will need to update the _site.yml file. The process for modifying this will be described in the next section.

13.5.3 Modifying the Site Structure

The site structure is controlled by the _site.yml file (See ??). This file provides the rendering engine the instruction for how to assemble the entire website and create the navigation bar. If you wish add a new webpage directly to the navigation bar you will need to update this yaml file.

Open the _site.yml file as shown below (excerpt):

name: "Wake Forest University"
output_dir: "docs"
navbar:
  title: "Wake Forest University Institutional Research"
  right:
    - text: "home"
      href: index.html

If you wish to add a new site called “My New Page” directly to the navigation bar you would update the code as follows:

name: "Wake Forest University"
output_dir: "docs"
navbar:
  title: "Wake Forest University Institutional Research"
  right:
    - text: "home"
      href: index.html
    - text: "My New Site"
      href: my-new-site.html

If you wish to add a menu, so that a button is on the main navigation page, but when clicked options appear you could use the following syntax:

name: "Wake Forest University"
output_dir: "docs"
navbar:
  title: "Wake Forest University Institutional Research"
  right:
    - text: "home"
      href: index.html
    - text: "Menu Name"
      menu:
        - text: "My New Site"
          href: my-new-site.html
        - text: "New Dashboard"
          href: dashboards/test/index.html

The above could would create a new button on the navigation bar called “Menu Name” that when clicked would reveal a menu drop-down with one option being “My New Site” and another being “New Dashboard”. This code also shows the relative reference that could be used to direct the “New Dashboard” to a html file located in the “dashboard” then “test” path. This represents how subdirectories can be reflected in the _site.yml links.

As mentioned in Section 13.4.1, a change in the _site.yml file must be applied globally through building all the pages. This building procedure is described in Section 13.4.1 in detail.

13.5.4 Setting Security

It is important to use the .htaccess file in each directory in order to set permissions. While the entire website will inherit whatever permissions are set in the root directory at a minimum, it is a good practice to put a copy of this file in each directory or sub-folder to ensure that should one become corrupted, another layer exists. The details for creating the different .htaccess files have been described in 13.4.4. If you create a new text file and name it .htaccess and modify the text mentioned, you can generate your own custom permissions based on your project need.