Be sure to have Node.js 7.x+ installed.
Run npm install in the project root. This will install some build tools we use.
Run npm run build-in-place to do the templating and stylesheet compilation in-place. You can then view the site by simply opening index.html.
Run ./build.sh to do a local build into the out/ directory. You can then preview the site at out/index.html. This should usually be the same as just index.html, but it is good to check before committing, since this "local deploy" process is slightly more complicated than the in-place build process.
The file index.hbs is usually what you should edit, basically as though you were editing an HTML file. The final HTML is generated with some JavaScript processing that pulls in data from the YAML files in the data directory -- basically the information in the lectures and assignments tables.
Run the script ./deploy.sh from the root directory of the project to build and deploy the page to GitHub. The script does the following: 1) Pulls down the gh-pages branch into a folder called "out" in the project root directory. (GitHub serves webpages from gh-pages branches.) Then it runs npm run build which compiles the page and puts the output into out. Then the revised out folder is committed and pushed back to the gh-pages branch, ready to be served.
Stylus is used for styling.
Handlebars is used for templating. index.hbs is minimally templated, mostly delegating to the partials in templates/. Those pull their data from data/. The logic that ties them all together is in build/templater.js.
The site is intended to be responsive, which we accomplish with per-device stylesheets and media queries in the HTML.
While editing you should be using an EditorConfig plugin for your text editor to enforce a few basic stylistic things.
We are trying to maintain a reasonable HTML document outline (so, don't use <section> as if it were <div>). To preview the document outline, use the HTML 5 Outliner tool.