Demo Content

Demo content adds two finished example stories to your site, so you can see how a Telar story is built and how it behaves before you write your own.

What is Demo Content?

Demo content is a set of example stories, together with the objects and glossary entries they use. Telar downloads it from content.telar.org each time your site builds and adds it to your own content. It is never saved in your repository, so when you turn it off, the next build leaves it out.

Demo content is marked wherever it appears, so you can always tell it apart from your own work.

The Demo Stories

Your site gets two stories, in your site’s language:

English title	Spanish title	Steps	What it shows
The Allegorical Woman	La mujer alegórica	10	A simple story built around one image
Colonial Landscapes	Paisajes coloniales	22	A longer story with chapters, panels and primary sources

The Allegorical Woman

This story, by Natalie Cobo, follows the details of Aspecto Symbólico del Mundo Hispánico, a 1761 engraving by Laureano Atlas held by Princeton University Library. It shows:

Steps that move around a single image, zooming in on one detail at a time
A IIIF (pronounced “triple-eye-eff”) image served by the institution that holds it, Princeton University Library, rather than by content.telar.org
A step that switches to a second image, the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan
Layer panels, including one step with a second layer
Links to glossary entries from the story’s text

The first step links to the story’s spreadsheet in Google Sheets, so you can compare each row with the step it produces.

Colonial Landscapes

This story is a selection from Colonial Landscapes, a project by Santiago Muñoz, Adelaida Ávila, and María Alejandra Orduz Avella. It is built around a 1614 painting of the Bogotá savanna, made for a lawsuit and held by the Archivo General de Indias in Seville.

The story is organized as follows:

The first step introduces the original project and links to it, and the last step repeats that link
Four chapters, each opened by a title card: “A Painting of the Savanna”, “Villages for the “indios””, “From Terraces to Grasslands”, and “A Divided Landscape”
Most of the other steps have a layer panel, which holds the longer text, image carousels, and callouts to primary sources

Each primary source is a glossary entry, which opens from its callout in a panel. Many of the entries end with a See full document link to the document’s own object page; two panels link to documents in the same way. The painting and the nine documents are served from content.telar.org as IIIF images. Five of the documents have more than one page, and their object pages let you move from page to page.

The glossary also includes several key terms and one person, so the glossary page groups its entries under Key terms, Primary sources, and People and entities.

Turning Demo Content On or Off

Demo content is controlled by one setting in _config.yml. A new Telar site has it turned on.

To change it:

Open _config.yml
Find the story_interface section
Set include_demo_content to true to show the demo stories, or false to hide them:
```
story_interface:
  include_demo_content: true
```
Commit the change

GitHub Actions rebuilds your site, and the change appears when the build finishes. If you build your site on your own computer, run python3 scripts/csv_to_json.py and python3 scripts/generate_collections.py (or python3 scripts/build_local_site.py, which runs both) before Jekyll. See Local Development.

Keep the demos while you learn The demo stories are useful to keep open next to your own while you write your first story. Turn them off before you share your site.

Where Demo Content Appears

Demo content appears in the same places as your own content, with a label:

Where	What you see
Home page	The demo stories, listed before your own stories, with a DEMO badge
Story intro card	A Demo content label above the story title
Layer panels	A Demo content badge next to the panel title
Objects page	The demo objects, listed after your own objects, with a DEMO badge
Object page	A Demo content label above the object title
Glossary page	A DEMO badge next to each demo entry
Glossary entry page	A Demo content badge next to the entry title

On a Spanish site the labels read DEMO and Contenido de demostración.

Language

Demo content follows your site’s language, set by telar_language in _config.yml:

Your setting	Demo content you get
`telar_language: "en"`	English stories, objects and glossary
`telar_language: "es"`	Spanish stories, objects and glossary

Any other value gets the English demo content. If you change your site’s language, the next build fetches the demo content in the new language.

Demo Content and Your Own Content

Demo content is added to your content during the build, and it never replaces anything of yours:

	Your content	Demo content
Where it lives	Your repository	Downloaded during each build; not saved in your repository
Editable	Yes	No
Label	None	DEMO badge or Demo content label
Same object ID as one of yours	—	Your object is kept and the demo object is left out
Same glossary entry ID as one of yours	—	Your entry is kept and the demo entry is left out

The demo object and glossary IDs all begin with demo-, so they do not normally match yours.

Using the Demos as Models

The demo stories are written in the same spreadsheet format as your own stories. Their sources are published in the demo content repository on GitHub, under demos/v1.8.0/en/ and demos/v1.8.0/es/:

demo-project.csv: the two stories’ rows in the project sheet
demo-objects.csv: the objects
allegorical-woman.csv and colonial-landscapes.csv (mujer-alegorica.csv and paisajes.csv in Spanish): the stories’ steps
glossary.csv (glosario.csv in Spanish): the glossary entries, with the kind column that marks sources and people
texts/stories/: the markdown files for the Colonial Landscapes panels

To see how a story’s structure shows up on the page, compare the rows of colonial-landscapes.csv with the story on your site: the rows with an empty object column are the chapter title cards.

Troubleshooting

Demo Stories Do Not Appear

If you turned demo content on and the stories are missing:

Check that include_demo_content: true is inside the story_interface section of _config.yml
Check that the build finished in your repository’s Actions tab
Open the build log, expand the Convert CSV to JSON step, and look for the lines that begin with Telar Demo Content Fetcher
Reload the page without the cache (Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+R on Mac)

The Demo Content Could Not Be Downloaded

If content.telar.org cannot be reached, or the download fails, the build log says that your site will build without demos, and the build continues. Your own content is published as usual, without the demo stories. The next build tries again.

Demo Content Is in the Wrong Language

Check telar_language in _config.yml. It must be "en" or "es"; any other value gets the English demo content.