About the Website

General usage

Hopefully everything is self evident. One less noticeable feature is that some information is available in alternative forms, as follows:

• A calendar symbol (Add as calendar) near a title or an item means that the information is available as an ical feed, which can be used by calendar applications (e.g., Google calendars). For example, each seminar has such a calendar.

• A feed symbol (Add as an atom feed) similarly provides the information as an atom feed, usable by news readers, such as Feedly.

• A printer icon (PDF version) provides a pdf version. This is created from a LaTeX version, which is available as well, on the corresponding html page.

• API: All resources are available via an API, following the

• json:api standard, under the /api/v1 namespace. A simpler json form and an xml version are available by adding the .json or .xml extensions. This is useful for interaction with other pages, and for shell scripts. For example, I have the following shell function to find someone’s contact details:

  ph() {
    curl -s -g "https://www.math.bgu.ac.il/api/v1/users.json?fields[users]=email,first,last,phone,office&filter[email][match]=${1}&filter[|][first][match]=${1}&filter[|][last][match]=${1}" | json_xs
  }
  

  This will match the email, first name and last name against the given argument (regexp) and print a simplified json of the matching entries (which is pretified by json_xs)

The rest of this page is intended for members of the department.

Editing content

A central principle for the website is to make it easy for any member of the department to modify any content related to them, so that updates are quick and accurate. To achieve this, one should first Login, using the department username and password.

Once this is done, certain parts will slightly alter their appearance, to show that they are modifiable. For example, the member’s name in the appropriate page (e.g., on the Regular Faculty page, if the user belongs there) will have an edit button by it, which looks like this: Edit this on gitlab or like this: Edit. Clicking it will bring up an html form where various details (e.g., research interests) can be modified.

Additionally, some items will appear with a dashed underline, which means they can be edited directly, without a form. Examples of these include the office and phone numbers that appear in the table.

Following are the main details that can be modified.

• Personal details. These include contact details, research interests, students/postdocs/supervisors, etc.

• Events. Click the New Event button at the bottom of the Events to add a new event (e.g., a conference).

• Courses. If you are teaching an advanced course, an entry for it should be created on the Courses page for that term. See Courses below for details.

• Seminars. If you wish to run a seminar, you may create one on the Seminars page. You may then edit its details, add meetings, etc. See Seminars below for details.

• The Visitors’ Wiki. This is not really an integral part of the department website, but is a useful resource for visitors.

What elements of the site can be modified by a particular person depends on that person’s roles in the department. If permissions seem wrong, please write to the

Courses

There are two notions of a course: a “generic” course, which essentially corresponds to an entry in the course catalogue (“Shnaton”), and a regular course, which is an instance of a generic course that is actually being taught by a particular person on a particular term.

The latter kind should normally be created by the person teaching the course. The easiest way to do this is by finding a similar course in a previous term, and clicking the copy icon next to it. The copy icon looks like this: Clone this, or like this: Clone. Pressing it will create a new course form, with default values taken from the previously taught course. Another method is to visit the generic courses page, and click new on the relevant generic course. This will use the defaults of the generic course. It is also possible to start from scratch by clicking new course on the Courses page.

The edit page for a course features an update button attached to its generic course, which can be used to fill the blank entries from the corresponding entries in generic course. This will also fetch information from the course catalogue, if available. Likewise, the generic course has an update button, which fills the blank fields with entries from the course catalogue.

Seminars

To start a new seminar, use the New Seminar button on the bottom of the Seminars page. This will open a page to fill in the details. By default, the creator will be the only admin for the seminar, i.e., the only one allowed to add meetings. However, every admin can make additional users admins.

Note: If the seminar name is filled only in one language, it will always be displayed in that language, and will not be translated.

The page for each seminar contains the list of talks. If the user is an admin for this seminar, there will be a New Meeting button at the bottom to schedule meetings. As usual, each meeting can be modified by clicking the edit icon by its title.

Please note that seminars should be re-created each term. As with courses, the easiest way to do this is to find the seminar in a previous term, and click the clone buttonclone.

An efficient way to run the mailing list for the seminar is via the mailing list server. If the seminar has a mailing list on this server, and the name of the list is detailed in the seminar parameters, there will be a link to the page, and the address will be advertised in the pdf announcements. The seminar admins will have a button on the meeting’s page that allows them to (edit and) send an announcement to the mailing list.

Text formatting

Most of the text boxes that appear when editing components allow basic formatting, using a variant of markdown. In a nutshell, this allows constructs such as **bold** for bold, *italic* for italic, `code` for code, etc. In addition, it is possible to typeset basic math using standard LaTeX notation, delimited, as usual, by dollar signs. Please note that general latex is not supported, only math. Also, please avoid using html markup, since most of the markup needs also to be translated to LaTeX.

Source code

The source code for the site is available with:

git clone https://www.math.bgu.ac.il/git/wwwmath/bgumath.git

Contributions are welcome!