Create a landing page that is browsable in the platform

[zoghbi-a]

When the notebooks are automatically loaded when a user login, it will be nice to have a landing page (in markdown) that is opened automatically, and should give a quick intro with a short description of the notebooks and links that would launch them.

This issue is to create a landing page document. The rest will be part of the image itself.

[zoghbi-a]

The simplest way to do it is add some file (e.g. intro.md), but I am not sure how it would play out in the generated docs. @bsipocz, any thoughts?

[bsipocz]

Our landing page currently is index.md. We can add whatever extra content we want to it, but it will still use the book theme. When projects need a totally different type of landing page (e.g compare www.numpy.org to https://numpy.org/numpy-tutorials/ or https://numpy.org/doc/stable/) then they put a Hugo themed landing at the top.
There are ongoing efforts to move the whole ecosystem into the same page by abandoning sphinx, but that is not yet done and I don't think it's worth it for us to wait for it.

So, what we can do relatively easily to either modify index.md or add one more layer on the top, but within the same theme (like the np docs). That will limit what we can change in styling etc (I'm also not a frontend guru so I would like to avoid diving into too much CSS as there are a lot of nuances that work now but can be a minefield if we fly solo), but some big picture customisation is possible (e.g. turning of the sidebar for the landing page, etc.

[zoghbi-a]

what I am looking for will be rendered as md inside jupyterlab not html.

[bsipocz]

Hmm. Not sure if this is the correct repo for it then or fornax-documentation. Either case, we can ignore and md file for the htmls, so it can be added to either repos I suppose. E.g README.md is ignored and only serves the purpose to have something as a github landing page on the repo.

(I would just like to avoid the situation to have multiple locations to document the same things as versions tend to diverge over time...)

[jkrick]

I think the point here is that Fornax now automatically has loaded a fresh pull of the main branch of fornax-demo-notebooks when a user logs into jupyterlab.This is an improvement, and overall something we want. The problem is that us users can't see the notebooks in the left hand file folder section of jupyterlab and therefore can't open the files in a notebook view. So, I think this issue is to have some sort of way for users to be able to click on those .md files and open them as notebooks. But, if I am confusing the issue @zoghbi-a please clarify.