Getting Started

Have a challenge with any of this? Let us know and we’ll help!

Video Tutorial

Recommended Steps

• Enable GitHub Actions. We use several actions on the project, and when you fork the repository, you’ll need to enable these actions to run (as a security measure that GitHub rightly takes). In the top menu in your repository, click Actions. You’ll see a green button that says I understand my workflows, go ahead and enable them. Click that button.
• Delete the CNAME file – that one belongs to us so you’ll have a conflict if you try to publish and it’s still there. We’ll walk through steps to set this up later.
• Go through the Configuration Guide for the Minimal Mistakes theme, and update the docs/_config.yml file accordingly.
  • We’ve configured some sensible defaults and added comments where they might be helpful.
• As you go through the posts in the _posts directory, feel free to delete them so that they don’t ship with your site.
• You may want to replace or delete the /docs/favicon.ico file, which is currently the Excella logo.
• You may want to set comments in docs/_config.yaml from giscus to false temporarily, until you follow the docs below to set up Giscus commenting.
• You may want to update the paginate setting in docs/_config.yml to 5 (default) or something less than the 50 we’ve set it to for demo purposes.
• You may wish to rename your repository so that it is not also called blog-in-a-box, which makes sense. To do that, go into your repository’s settings. On the main settings page, you’ll see the name of the repository which you can edit to a new name and then click the Rename button.

How to Subscribe to Updates of This Tool

Occasionally, we might update some things or add some new default functionality that you might find useful.

When we do that, we’ll publish a release.

You can subscribe to those releases so that you’ll know when new things are coming. To do that:

• Head to this project’s GitHub URL: https://github.com/excellalabs/blog-in-a-box
• In the buttons at the top right, click the drop-down for the Watch menu, select Custom, and then check Releases.

Now you’ll be notified if we release anything, along with the release notes.