You can customize various aspects of your Curvenote site including:

  • actions - in the top right of the default template, these are visible throughout your site.
  • nav - links in the navigation top bar that are visible throughout your site.
  • logo - the logo and logoText, see Logo & branding for more.
  • toc - the table of contents that is the list of all documents in your site, see Table of Contents for more.
Parts of a Curvenote site that you can customize using the default template.

Figure: 1Parts of a Curvenote site that you can customize using the default template.

Navigation

The site.nav can include any number of links to pages in your site. The title will be shown in the navigation bar, and the url is where you will navigate when you click! Please make sure this matches a URL that is accessible on your site.

version: 1
site:
  nav:
    - title: My PhD Thesis
      url: /phd
    - title: Nested Menu
      children:
        - title: My Menu Item
          url: /a-link

The nav is a list of these links, and it can also create nested drop-downs by providing a children list for top level navigations. If children are provided, the url field will not be used as the click will open the drop-down.

An example of nested drop-down navigation on the https://transform.softwareunderground.org/ site.

Figure: 2An example of nested drop-down navigation on the https://transform.softwareunderground.org/ site.

Actions

Actions are buttons that appear on the right of the navigation bar. By default, a single “Learn More” action is added to new curvenote sites. You can add, customize and remove actions by editing the actions: list in the site: section of the root curvenote.yml file.

version: 1
site:
  actions:
    - title: Learn More
      url: https://docs.curvenote.com/web

⚒️ To Customize the existing action, simply update the title: and url: fields in place

version: 1
site:
  actions:
    - title: Curvenote on GitHub
      url: https://gihub.com/curvenote

⚒️ To add more actions, add additional items to the YAML list, each with their own title: and url: fields

version: 1
site:
  actions:
    - title: GitHub
      url: https://gihub.com/curvenote
    - title: Sign Up
      url: https://curvenote.com/signup

🛠️ To remove all actions, set the field to an empty list actions: []

version: 1
site:
  actions: []

Including Static Files

You can include static files like PDF documents in the public folder in the root of your site; these will be deployed with the rest of your site. To include these in the action, put a static: true, which will ensure the PDF opens in a new tab and the URL is modified correctly. The url should point to your public folder.

site:
  actions:
    - title: Download Thesis
      url: public/my_thesis.pdf
      static: true

For auto-generated PDF files from your content, you can build these with Curvenote.