Release of Sandpaper 0.15.0

This is the eighteenth post continuing a series that we are calling “The Dovetail”, about the transition to The Carpentries Workbench (our new lesson infrastructure). In this series, we aim to keep members of The Carpentries community abreast of the current news about the Workbench. If you are unfamiliar with The Workbench, you can watch a video that describes the workbench and the beta phase in two minutes.

If you are interested in participating in discussions around The Carpentries Workbench, or if you have questions, head over to our GitHub Discussions forum.

If you have used the workbench and would like to provide feedback, please tell us about your experience.

Six months of success

As of 16 November 2023, we acheived a milestone of 6 months where all of our lessons have been using The Workbench. Since the last update on 13 April 2023, we have seen a huge outpouring of support from the community to support the lesson transition phase that was finalized on 16 May 2023 when Foundations of Astronomical Data Science was transitioned to use The Workbench.

Since then, we have been hard at work to shore up capacity within the Core Team while fixing bugs and implementing new features such as the processing of workshop overview pages, child documents, and a spoiler class of fenced divs to collapse parts of the lesson.

Sandpaper 0.15.0 to be released on 29 November 2023

In this next version of the user interface to The Workbench, we have implemented features that have been requested.

1. R Markdown lessons can choose to render a handout by using handout: true in their config.yaml (this will be available for all lessons with the release of pegboard 0.8.0).
2. The “More” dropdown menu for the Instructor view will now also contain links to the learner materials underneath the Instructor materials.
   
3. For peer-reviewed lessons, adding a doi: with a valid DOI in the config.yaml will have a DOI badge to appear in the tool bar that links to the publication or archive (see image below).
4. For those building the lessons in Docker, the site/ folder is now customisable using the SANDPAPER_SITE environment variable.

In addition, we will release {varnish} 0.4.0, which will update the visual styling of the status badges to make them more prominent.

All this along with documentation upgrades and bugfixes will be available starting on 29 November 2023, and it will automatically propogate to all lessons by 5 December 2023.

Giving Thanks

It has been over six months since we wrote a Dovetail blog post and needless to say, there are a lot of people that I would like to thank. I’m grateful for everyone who has taken the opportunity to open issues in The Workbench repositories to report bugs or features needed. I’m especially grateful for everyone who has additionally opened pull requests to fix these bugs.

The whole reason this project works is because of the community. Full stop. Below, I list all the contributors from GitHub who have opened issues or pull requests that have lead to bugfixes or features in The Workbench, but I do want to acknowledge that there are so many more people who could be named here, including the Maintainers who have been able to give feedback directly in Maintainer meetings, Lesson Developers working in The Carpentries Incubator giving feedback about their use case, everyone from the internationalisation community whose continued efforts bring us closer to natively supporting translations, and last but not least, the brave souls who are willing to open an issue and dream that we will continue to grow.

Sandpaper

Thank you to all the people who have who have contributed to or opened issues that have led to the improvement of {sandpaper} since version 0.11.15: @froggleston, @karenword, @ErinBecker, @fherreazcue, @tobyhodges, @milanmlft, @apirogov, @fnattino, @tesaunders, @mwhamgenomics, @kaijagahm, @jcolomb, @klbarnes20, @ocaisa, @joelnitta, @velait, @cynthiaftw, @debpaul, @bencomp, @ostephens and @twrightsman

Pegboard

Thank you to all the people who have who have contributed to or opened issues that have led to the improvement of {pegboard} since version 0.5.2: @joelnitta, @trhallam, @tobyhodges, @klbarnes20, @beastyblacksmith, @ErinBecker and @uschille

Varnish

Thank you to all the people who have contributed to or opened issues that have led to the improvement of {varnish} since version 0.2.16: @brownsarahm, @froggleston, @tobyhodges, @Robadob, @marklcrowe and @bencomp