Have fun with pelican site generator
If you followed my previous post about pelican you already have Pelican installed and probably seen the default theme.
In this post I will show you how to download a lot of plugin and themes that you can use in your own project.
Install plugins
git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-plugins
Fix your config to point at your plugins folder
PLUGIN_PATHS = ["/Users/username/Utvikling/spyder/ssg/pelican-plugins",]
PLUGINS = ["liquid_tags", "sitemap", "read_more_link"]
It will now load the plugins listed in the plugins array. To get the list with a short description of all the plugins you downloaded visit: https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-plugins
Install themes
git clone --recursive https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes
Set the desired theme in your pelicanconf.py file
THEME = '/Users/username/spyder/ssg/pelican-themes/gum'
You can browse all the themes (with screenshots) at: http://pelicanthemes.com
Static content
STATIC_PATHS = ['images','files']
The content of STATIC_PATHS are copied to your output folder without modification. The default value of this variable is 'images' which gives a good starting point. Remember that your STATIC_PATH folder must reside inside your content folder.
As I have a migration from joomla -> pelican my images folder contains a lot of empty (0-bytes) index.html files that I need to remove.
$ cd pelicanroot/content/images
$ find . -name "index.html" -exec rm -rf {} \;
Now all my empty index.html files are gone, but there is still some HTML content in my images folder that I dont want Pelican to bother with. So instead of deleting more files I use on of the features available in Pelican.
ARTICLE_EXCLUDES = ['images']
This will tell Pelican to not process any html/md content found in the images folder.
Create your own theme
The next step for me was to create my own theme which, was easy as soon as I understood the basics. Pelican use the Jinja template engine which is one of the most used template engines for python.
To create a theme in pelican you have to use a specific structure of files and folders. A good tip is to see how the other templates are built before starting on your own.