dataresearchcenter.org

Production website for the Data and Research Center (DARC) — https://dataresearchcenter.org.

Built with MkDocs + Material for MkDocs. Content is plain markdown under docs/, built and deployed to S3 on every push to main.

Other DARC sites: clone this repo as a starting point. It is no longer a shared upstream template/boilerplate — only the design layer is shared (see Design system).

Setup

python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Develop & build

mkdocs serve        # http://localhost:8000 (live reload)
mkdocs build        # → ./site

Image optimization (the optimize plugin) runs in CI only — it's gated on CI=true. To run it locally you also need the pngquant binary (apt install pngquant / brew install pngquant); Pillow comes from requirements.txt:

CI=true mkdocs build

Layout

docs/
  *.md                   pages (what-we-do, who-we-are, projects, contact, index)
  blog/                  blog plugin: index + posts/
  reference.md           component authoring reference
  stylesheets/           tokens · components · site · extra
  javascripts/           scroll-color.js
  overrides/             Material template overrides (header, footer, main, nav)
mkdocs.yml               theme, nav, markdown_extensions, plugins
requirements.txt
.github/workflows/publish.yml   build (+ optimize) and sync ./site to S3

Authoring

docs/reference.md has copy-pasteable markdown for every component — screens, heroes, card grids, profile cards, buttons, chips, admonitions, icons.

Design system

The shared, cross-DARC design layer is darc-zensical.css, loaded at build time from zensical-theme-darc. Keep project-specific styling out of it — use the local layers instead:

• docs/stylesheets/tokens.css — design tokens (colors, spacing, stroke, radii)
• docs/stylesheets/components.css — .screen, .hero, .grid.cards, .btn, profile cards
• docs/stylesheets/site.css — layout chrome (drawer, header, footer, typography, list markers)
• docs/stylesheets/extra.css — last-mile overrides