Collaboration

We originally developed Webifier for a very practical teaching problem: GitHub already had excellent collaborative tooling, and GitHub Pages already had a publication pipeline, but there was too much glue work between “a repository full of student notebooks and notes” and “a useful course website.”

The first public Webifier repository on GitHub, webifier/build, dates to August 18, 2021, during the Covid-era scramble to make course material easier to share online. Around the same course-publishing push, we used it for Sharif University of Technology AI course material repositories such as sut-ai/notes and sut-ai/supplementary, where hundreds of students could open pull requests to one repository, share notebooks and educational content with one another, and have the shared website update automatically.

The original version was essentially a Jekyll data generator: it bridged Git's collaboration model with GitHub Pages so many people could contribute content to one repository without hand-maintaining a website.

I later picked Webifier back up and made it more general. Thankfully, the last few years of LLM-assisted coding made the refactor much less ridiculous than it would have been the first time around: the Jekyll dependency is gone, the renderer and extension system is cleaner, and the project is now documented as something people can actually reuse, extend, and improve.

The goal is still the same: keep the publishing overhead low. Put useful content in a repository, organize it clearly, let Git track the changes, and let Webifier turn the reachable content into a static website.

Webifier is useful when it disappears into the workflow: add content, organize it, push to Git, and let the website update itself. Contributions that make that experience smoother are especially welcome.

Good places to help:

• Improve templates for documentation, notebooks, galleries, reports, and personal websites.
• Add real examples that show how repositories can be organized.
• Tighten the GitHub Action and local CLI experience.
• Improve notebook rendering, asset handling, and content discovery.
• Build extensions for reusable formats like course pages, academic sites, resumes, collections, and project galleries.
• Test Webifier on existing repositories and report the rough edges.

Feel free to reach out, open an issue, start a discussion, or send a pull request. Questions, rough notes, examples of what did or did not work, and early feedback are all welcome.

Start with the build repository, the extensions repository, or the website repository.