Wiki

Made with ❤️ at Stony Brook University

Wiki

Drawing inspiration from real-world web development practices, our team broke new ground for iGEM at Stony Brook by incorporating mockups, version control, and open-source into our biggest, most ambitious wiki approach ever. Here’s how we built it.

Mockups

Our summer started with spitballing and whiteboarding. We knew from the start that we wanted a wiki that would be modern, responsive, and aesthetically pleasing. If we wanted to touch all those bases, we knew we had to agree on a look before we put finger to keyboard - on the fly design work wouldn’t cut it.

Collaboration

What happens when you cross a codebase with multiple remote contributors and a need for solid version control? Git! We setup a GitHub organization and a static GitHub pages site (at igem-sbu.github.io) to see near-real-time changes and jump back in time whenever needed. Just to be extra, we integrated a GitHub bot with our Slack wiki channel to stay on top of every commit.

Drafts and Polish

The majority of our wiki was drafted and exported using Mobirise - which allows users to visually edit a static site. For any pages or blocks that were too technically advanced to draft in Mobirise, we’d put them together by hand.