Here is a summary of the frequently asked questions for Pelican.
If you have a problem, question, or suggestion, please start by striking up a conversation on #pelican on Freenode. Those who don’t have an IRC client handy can jump in immediately via IRC webchat. Because of differing time zones, you may not get an immediate response to your question, but please be patient and stay logged into IRC — someone will almost always respond.
If you are unable to resolve your issue or if you have a feature request, please refer to the issue tracker.
There are several ways to help out. First, you can use Pelican and report any suggestions or problems you might have via IRC or the issue tracker.
If you want to contribute, please fork the git repository, create a new feature branch, make your changes, and issue a pull request. Someone will review your changes as soon as possible. Please refer to the How to Contribute section for more details.
You can also contribute by creating themes and improving the documentation.
No, it’s not. Configuration files are just an easy way to configure Pelican. For basic operations, it’s possible to specify options while invoking Pelican via the command line. See pelican --help for more information.
Pygments adds some classes to the generated content. These classes are used by themes to style code syntax highlighting via CSS. Specifically, you can customize the appearance of your syntax highlighting via the .codehilite pre class in your theme’s CSS file. To see how various styles can be used to render Django code, for example, you can use the demo on the project website.
Please refer to How to create themes for Pelican.
Markdown is not a hard dependency for Pelican, so you will need to explicitly install it. You can do so by typing:
$ (sudo) pip install markdown
In case you don’t have pip installed, consider installing it via:
$ (sudo) easy_install pip
Yes. For example, to include a modified date in a Markdown post, one could include the following at the top of the article:
Modified: 2012-08-08
That meta-data can then be accessed in the template:
{% if article.modified %}
Last modified: {{ article.modified}}
{% endif %}
It’s as simple as adding an extra line of metadata to any pages or articles you want to have its own template.
template: template_name
Then just make sure to have the template installed in to your theme as template_name.html.
To disable all feed generation set FEED_ATOM and FEED_RSS to None in your settings. Please note None and '' are not the same thing. The word None should not be surrounded by quotes.
RSS and Atom feeds require all URLs and links in them to be absolute. In order to properly generate all URLs properly in Pelican you will need to set SITEURL to the full path of your blog. When using make html and the default Makefile provided by the pelican-quickstart bootstrap script to test build your site, it’s normal to see this warning since SITEURL is deliberately left undefined. If configured properly no other make commands should result in this warning.
Feeds are still generated when this warning is displayed but may not validate.
Starting in 3.0, some of the FEED setting names were changed to more explicitly refer to the Atom feeds they inherently represent (much like the FEED_RSS setting names). Here is an exact list of the renamed setting names:
FEED -> FEED_ATOM
TAG_FEED -> TAG_FEED_ATOM
CATEGORY_FEED -> CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM
Older 2.x themes that referenced the old setting names may not link properly. In order to rectify this, please update your theme for compatibility with 3.0+ by changing the relevant values in your template files. For an example of complete feed headers and usage please check out the simple theme.