MkDocs and Material for MkDocs

By default, the GitHub repository assigned to a team for wiki already contains some wiki contents. These wiki contents are written in the Markdown language and are converted into a wiki site using MkDocs with the Material for MkDocs theme.

In this tutorial, we will cover some routines in updating the site, through editing the Markdown (.md) files in the GitHub repository. You do not need to have prior coding experience or experience with Git / GitHub to complete this tutorial.

Static site generator

MkDocs is a static site generator. This means that a web developer does not worry about coding the website structure or appearance, and only focuses on writing some plain but structured text files. The static site generator then converts these text files into website contents. In this process, most of the website appearances are already set up, and so the amount of time spent on customizing them is minimized.

Learn Markdown in 10 mins

The text files are "structured" with the Markdown language and saved with a .md extension. The Markdown language is the way of instructing the site generator of what to do with our texts, like "make this a header", or "here is a list with bullet points". Learning how to write in the Markdown language is absolutely necessary, but it is also easy.

Please go to Commonmark.org, read through the Markdown syntax and complete the 10 minutes interative Markdown tutorial. Once you are done please proceed to the next section.