I have a github organization site, plus subsites for several distinct projects within that organization. These nest as main.org (which has general organizational content), main.org/SUB1 (content for project 1), main.org/SUB2, etc. These sites shared theming, templates, data, etc.
The goal is for each project to manage their own content (basically, plaintext posts), while using the organizational templates / theming / data etc without having to manage it.
We currently do this with git submodules - i.e. the organizational jekyll site is a submodule of each of the subsites, and shared layouts etc get pulled from there. This works, but feels like unnecessary technical overhead for folks basically just managing content (though we are already getting them to run jekyll locally and check their changes). People also find the inverted relationship confusing.
We're contemplating turning the shared content into a theme. This seems mechanically easier + more intuitive for the sub sites: changes fiddling with git to a bundle command to update theme + no possibility of messing with the theme. However, it seems to be leading to duplicating assets when building. It should do that locally (so people can see their content rendering correctly), but not on the "live" version - is there a way to manage that? I'm clear on how to change what gets put in headers locally vs live to point to the organizational site source, but presumably the asset folders still get built?
More broadly: are there other arrangements that make sense relative to the organizational arrangement?
