Configure a Pelican Theme

Now that you've got the basic Pelican site up and running the next thing you'll probably want to do is modify the look and feel. There is a fairly large collection of themes available at Pelican Themes Github and most work decently out of the box. My favorite is the one I'm using here, pelican-bootstrap3, and you can preview the themes at http://www.pelicanthemes.com.

Here are the highlevel steps:

  • Clone the pelican-bootstrap3 repository
  • Configure the site to use it by modifying pelicanconf.py
  • Validate the look and feel

Clone the pelican-bootstrap3 repository

1
git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes ~/pelican-themes

Note: I had some issues here and had to edit the .gitmodules file in ~/pelican-themes to remove brutalist. Once that was removed, I ran git submodule update --recursive and all files were checked out correctly. Since we're only interested in the pelican-bootstrap3 theme in this walkthrough, I don't checkout all the sub modules as the official howto shows.

Move the theme you want into your site directory

1
2
mkdir ~/pelican-site/themes
cp -r ~/pelican-themes/pelican-bootstrap3 themes/

Configure the site to use the theme

Most of the Pelican site configuration happens in pelicanconf.py in the root of your site. Add the following line to yours.

1
THEME = "themes/pelican-bootstrap3"

If the dev server is still running then the site will automatically regenerate. If it doesn't, restart the dev server.

1
2
3
# Start the testing server
make devserver
# Browse to http://localhost:8000

At this point you should see the new theme loaded. If you get errors, go back through the guide and compare your configuration.

Next, we run through setting up search on the static site!