Technicus, a Pelican theme

Technicus is a minimalist, light-on-dark, mobile-friendly Pelican theme intended for single-author blogs.

Demo

See this theme in action on the blog tech.reversedelay.net.

Limitations

As this theme’s development has been driven only by the needs of a particular single-author blog, there are several limitations, including:

• Many HTML elements in the “kitchen sink” set have not yet been specifically supported or tested.
  • Default browser styles are not reset, however, so most elements will still look fine.
• This theme might conflict with SEO plugins as it already includes a basic implementation of Open Graph and <meta name="description"> tags.
• The author-related and general-archives templates are not implemented (author.html, authors.html, and archives.html). This means 'authors', 'archives' have to be removed from the DIRECT_TEMPLATES setting, and AUTHOR_SAVE_AS set to ''.
  • Period archives (year/month/day), however, are implemented.
• The menu is entirely configured through a custom setting (pages and categories are not automatically listed, ignoring the DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU and DISPLAY_CATEGORIES_ON_MENU settings).
• Feeds (Atom/RSS) are not implemented.
• This theme has been tested only on the latest versions of Firefox and Chromium-based browsers on a small number of devices.

Feel free to fork this repository and make modifications according to specific project needs, and perhaps to even share back improvements through pull requests.

Usage

Prerequisites

This theme assumes that the pelican-neighbors plugin is installed, for easy navigation between chronologically-adjacent articles.

Settings

• CATEGORIES_URL & TAGS_URL: the URLs for the all-categories and all-tags templates, respectively. These are required for the links on the individual category/tag templates back to the all-categories/tags pages. Do not include the starting slash.

• TECHNICUS_FAVICON (optional): the path to the site favicon relative to SITEURL, including the starting slash. For example, TECHNICUS_FAVICON = '/images/favicon.png'.

• TECHNICUS_SITE_META_DESC (optional): the description string to be set in the Open Graph and <meta name="description"> tags for the home (index) page.

• TECHNICUS_DEFAULT_OG_IMAGE: the image to be used by default for Open Graph (i.e., social sharing previews). This must be set to the path of an image file relative to SITEURL, including the starting slash.

• TECHNICUS_FEDIVERSE_CREATOR: Fediverse account handle to be used for the fediverse:creator meta tag. See “Highlighting journalism on Mastodon”; on Mastodon, do not forget to update profile settings to allowlist the relevant domains to fully enable support for this tag.

• TECHNICUS_NAV: a list of two-item (<title>, <url>) tuples representing the main menu items. For example,

    TECHNICUS_NAV = [
        ('About', '/about/'),
        ('Categories', '/categories/'),
        ('Tags', '/tags/'),
    ]
  

• TECHNICUS_SHOW_ARTICLE_BYLINE (optional): if present and set to True (or any truthy value), articles will show “by Author” under the title, where Author is the article’s author metadata.

• TECHNICUS_FOOTER_HTML: the contents of this will show up in the footer wrapped in <small> tags. For example, here is a footer that takes advantage of the Bootstrap Icons included in this theme:

    TECHNICUS_FOOTER_HTML = """
    <cite>Technicus</cite> is a Pelican theme written by <a href="https://djramones.reversedelay.net/">DJ Ramones</a>.<br>
    <i class="bi-link-45deg"></i> <a href="https://github.com/djramones/technicus">github.com/djramones/technicus</a><br>
    <i class="bi-github"></i> <a href="https://github.com/djramones/technicus">@djramones/technicus</a>
    """
  

Custom 404 page

This theme includes a simple 404 page template. If '404' is included in the DIRECT_TEMPLATES setting, a 404.html file will be generated in the output root, making it ready for use by hosting services like GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages.

Content metadata

Aside from the usual content metadata (Title, Date, Slug, Category, Tags), this theme makes use of:

• Modified: the last-modified date of the content; displayed on both articles and pages
• Description: text that goes into the Open Graph and <meta name="description"> tags; it is recommended to keep this short
• Summary: used on the index pages; can be set to blank (e.g., in Markdown content, a Summary: line) to disable summaries on the index pages (so that only the title shows up)
• OG_Image: the image to be used for Open Graph (i.e., social sharing previews), overriding the site-wide TECHNICUS_DEFAULT_OG_IMAGE setting. This must be set to the path of an image file relative to SITEURL, including the starting slash. This works both for articles and pages.

Acknowledgements

This theme uses and includes the following:

• Source Sans 3 and Source Code Pro typefaces (SIL Open Font License Version 1.1)
• Bootstrap Icons (MIT License)
• Normalize.css (MIT License)