Pelican-Chameleon

Pelican-chameleon, originally pelican-iliork, is a single-column blog-writing theme based on Bootstrap for pelican. It provides an elegant way for switching between different Bootswatch themes (please see Screen Shots below) like a chameleon. Pelican-chameleon is built on Bootstrap 3. Some notable features are:

• Bootswatch theme support
• The css of this theme can be overwritten very easily
• Nestable menu items
• Google custom search support
• Multiple authors co-blogging

Demo

Please check out

• YueX.in, using Bootswatch Flatly, in Chinese.
• Screen Shots, chameleon with different bootswatch theme

Congfiguration

Bootstrap 3 Version and URL Overwriting

You can overwrite the default url of boostrap css and js by setting following variables. If these variables are not defined, the theme will use the 3.0.0 version of bootstrap.

BS3_URL = 'https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.1/css/bootstrap.min.css'
BS3_JS  = 'https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.1/js/bootstrap.min.js'

Use Bootstrap Theme

You can change the default appearance of Bootstrap to any Bootstrap theme you like. BS3_THEME defines the url of the theme's css file; BS3_THEME_NAME and BS3_THEME_HOMEPAGE define the name and url of bootstrap theme, which are used in the footer text.

See Screen Shots for demos. For more theme to choose from, have a look at Bootswatch.

# using Bootswatch Flatly
BS3_THEME = 'http://bootswatch.com/3/flatly/bootstrap.min.css'

Theme CSS Overwriting

You can use your own css file for code highlight. If you do not provide this value, pelican-chameleon will the default css file, solarized-light.css.

pelican-chameleon provides a easy to way to overwrite the css style of pelican-chameleon by providing CODE_HIGHLIGHT and CSS_OVERWRITE. When switching Boostrap themes, you may find these useful.

For example, if you want to use your preferred code highlight css, set the following option in your pelicanconf.py

CODE_HIGHLIGHT = 'url to your favorite code highlight css'

If you want to overwrite the css style of pelican-chameleon iteself, use

CSS_OVERWRITE = 'url to your css'

Nestable Menu Items

Menu items in pelican-chameleon is nestable. MENUITEMS are rendered as a top navbar. Nested menu items are rendered together as a drop-down button on the top navbar. But only 1-level nesting is allowed; it's clumsy, and perhaps wrong, to nest too much items in the menu. Here's a example.

MENUITEMS = [
    ('Home', '/'),
    ('Archives', [
        ('Tags', '/tags.html'),
        ('Categories', '/categories.html'),
        ('Chronological', '/archives.html'),
        ]),
    ('Social', [
        ('Email', 'mailto: [email protected]'),
        ('Github', 'http://url-to-github-page'),
        ('Facebook', 'http://url-to-facebook-page'),
        ]),
    ]

NOTE: If you use absolute domain like '/foo/bar/baz', your SITEURL will be inserted at the head to work around the redirection issue when hosting under non-root domain like 'http://stoic.edu/~maurelinus/'.

NOTE: Domains starting with http:// and https://, are generated to <a> tag with a target='_blank' attribute. For links within your site, use absolute domain like '/foo/bar/baz', they will be converted to the http style. Wish this will help to trap more readers. ;)

Google Custom Search

Put following in your MENUITEMS to have a Google custom search box on top navbar. 'Search' is the key, mandatory.

MENUITEMS = [
    ('Search', 'your Google custom search value'),
    ]

Favicon

To use your favicon, set following option in pelicanconf.py

FAVICON = u'url to your favicon'
FAVICON_TYPE = u'png or jpeg or whatever'

Multiple Author

You can direct the author link to whichever you want. It's not hard-coded in the theme.

AUTHORS = {
    u'jack': '/about.html',
    u'mary': 'http://mary.info',
    u'tony': 'http://tony.me',
}

Final Warning

If you have articles or pages written in markdown, remember to

pip install markdown

If you want to use Chinese in Category or Tag, remember to use Python3 (Thanks to @niboxy's advice)

Screen Shots

pelican-chameleon with default boostrap theme

pelican-chameleon with Amelia

pelican-chameleon with Cosmo

pelican-chameleon with Superhero

pelican-chameleon with United