Building Our Github.com Pages for SWUFE Drupal

01 November 2011 - Chengdu, China

Today I decided our Drupal Github Organization needed some Github Pages!

Next week I'll be giving a lesson on GIT and Github.com to my Drupal students. Github.com has been one of those amazing coding discoveries during my last year or so learning to build, code and program with Drupal 6 and now Drupal 7.

Github.com is an amazing social space for sharing your code! There are now several major open source projects that use Github.com for their work.

As Linux developers figured out, previous version control systems were limiting in the way they handled code and changes. GIT was created to be the answer to making coding easier and better together. While GIT has several advantages over other systems (let's save those details for later!), initially GIT was mainly just for Linux development. It was Github.com (and a few other other free GIT sites) and its creators who were the initiators in growing the use and popularity of GIT version control.

Basically, Github.com offers free GIT repos for any free and open source project. It's just GIT version control, but teyond that, Github looks cool and works extremely well and has added several usability additions like wiki pages and issue queue.

One of the most powerful Github.com features is how easy it is to fork a project, make changes and then, if the changes are important ones, send a "pull request" back to the original repo. If those changes are good ones, BAM! the maintainers of the main project can accept your changes into the main repo. WOW! Social coding just got better.

Today, while I was doing some work on other projects for my Drupal class, I took a look at one feature I hadn't tried before: Github.com Pages. Basically, it's a git repo that you can convert into an html site. Or, if you want, use Jekyll to create a dynamic site or blog like this one!

-Mark

Building Our Github.com Pages for SWUFE Drupal

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