starter theme / self documenting content

[jasonbrooks]

I was chatting today with @tigert and @bproffitt about ci testing to catch things like little gem issues with jekyll-springboard before we hit them during the design process (I've asked @duck-rh to help with that).

One of the things the came up was how blank the project is when you first try it out -- it might be nice to include a really basic site design in the main branch, or maybe in a secondary branch, if it's helpful to have a blank slate for some uses. The basic site could include some self-documenting content, like, change these places by editing such and such files where.

Depending on how far we wanted to go with it, we could make it more specific to an open source project page, like, put your elevator pitch here, put your quickstart here, your communication channels, etc.

We did talk about whether it'd be better to do this in a separate repo, downstream of this repo, perhaps to keep this one more generic? Either way, I want to make sure that we don't lose the stream of improvements and fixes that might come down through here.

What do you think, @garrett ?

[garrett]

I intentionally did not include starter content, as that would always conflict when sync'ing changes.
When I was starting this years ago, I thought about having an example site that's linked in the README (as an alternate approach).

Additionally, I ported a bunch of then-OSAS sites over to Springboard as demos and was thinking about including basic scaffolding from each, with SASS variables. Since then, CSS variables (aka: CSS custom properties) have been widespread for some time now, so I think a good approach would be to include a basic theme and set the colors with native CSS variables (which would mean there's no special importing to deal with per CSS file).

So, yeah, I think having a separate repo is the way to go, to make sure sites can easily update from this one (without having to jump through hoops with git — especially having to deal with merge conflicts).