How to create themes for Pelican¶

Pelican uses the great Jinja2 templating engine to generate its HTML output. Jinja2 syntax is really simple. If you want to create your own theme, feel free to take inspiration from the “simple” theme.

Structure¶

To make your own theme, you must follow the following structure:

├── static
│   ├── css
│   └── images
└── templates
    ├── archives.html         // to display archives
    ├── period_archives.html  // to display time-period archives
    ├── article.html          // processed for each article
    ├── author.html           // processed for each author
    ├── authors.html          // must list all the authors
    ├── categories.html       // must list all the categories
    ├── category.html         // processed for each category
    ├── index.html            // the index. List all the articles
    ├── page.html             // processed for each page
    ├── tag.html              // processed for each tag
    └── tags.html             // must list all the tags. Can be a tag cloud.

static contains all the static assets, which will be copied to the output theme folder. I’ve put the CSS and image folders here, but they are just examples. Put what you need here.
templates contains all the templates that will be used to generate the content. I’ve just put the mandatory templates here; you can define your own if it helps you keep things organized while creating your theme.

Templates and variables¶

The idea is to use a simple syntax that you can embed into your HTML pages. This document describes which templates should exist in a theme, and which variables will be passed to each template at generation time.

All templates will receive the variables defined in your settings file, if they are in all-caps. You can access them directly.

Common variables¶

All of these settings will be available to all templates.

Variable	Description
output_file	The name of the file currently being generated. For instance, when Pelican is rendering the homepage, output_file will be “index.html”.
articles	The list of articles, ordered descending by date All the elements are Article objects, so you can access their attributes (e.g. title, summary, author etc.). Sometimes this is shadowed (for instance in the tags page). You will then find info about it in the all_articles variable.
dates	The same list of articles, but ordered by date, ascending
tags	A list of (tag, articles) tuples, containing all the tags.
categories	A list of (category, articles) tuples, containing all the categories. and the list of respective articles (values)
pages	The list of pages

Sorting¶

URL wrappers (currently categories, tags, and authors), have comparison methods that allow them to be easily sorted by name:

{% for tag, articles in tags|sort %}

If you want to sort based on different criteria, Jinja’s sort command has a number of options.

Date Formatting¶

Pelican formats the date with according to your settings and locale (DATE_FORMATS/DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT) and provides a locale_date attribute. On the other hand, date attribute will be a datetime object. If you need custom formatting for a date different than your settings, use the Jinja filter strftime that comes with Pelican. Usage is same as Python strftime format, but the filter will do the right thing and format your date according to the locale given in your settings:

{{ article.date|strftime('%d %B %Y') }}

index.html¶

This is the home page of your blog, generated at output/index.html.

If pagination is active, subsequent pages will reside in output/index`n`.html.

Variable	Description
articles_paginator	A paginator object for the list of articles
articles_page	The current page of articles
dates_paginator	A paginator object for the article list, ordered by date, ascending.
dates_page	The current page of articles, ordered by date, ascending.
page_name	‘index’ – useful for pagination links

author.html¶

This template will be processed for each of the existing authors, with output generated at output/author/author_name.html.

If pagination is active, subsequent pages will reside as defined by setting AUTHOR_SAVE_AS (Default: output/author/author_name’n’.html).

Variable	Description
author	The name of the author being processed
articles	Articles by this author
dates	Articles by this author, but ordered by date, ascending
articles_paginator	A paginator object for the list of articles
articles_page	The current page of articles
dates_paginator	A paginator object for the article list, ordered by date, ascending.
dates_page	The current page of articles, ordered by date, ascending.
page_name	AUTHOR_URL where everything after {slug} is removed – useful for pagination links

category.html¶

This template will be processed for each of the existing categories, with output generated at output/category/category_name.html.

If pagination is active, subsequent pages will reside as defined by setting CATEGORY_SAVE_AS (Default: output/category/category_name’n’.html).

Variable	Description
category	The name of the category being processed
articles	Articles for this category
dates	Articles for this category, but ordered by date, ascending
articles_paginator	A paginator object for the list of articles
articles_page	The current page of articles
dates_paginator	A paginator object for the list of articles, ordered by date, ascending
dates_page	The current page of articles, ordered by date, ascending
page_name	CATEGORY_URL where everything after {slug} is removed – useful for pagination links

article.html¶

This template will be processed for each article, with .html files saved as output/article_name.html. Here are the specific variables it gets.

Variable	Description
article	The article object to be displayed
category	The name of the category for the current article

page.html¶

This template will be processed for each page, with corresponding .html files saved as output/page_name.html.

Variable	Description
page	The page object to be displayed. You can access its title, slug, and content.

tag.html¶

This template will be processed for each tag, with corresponding .html files saved as output/tag/tag_name.html.

If pagination is active, subsequent pages will reside as defined in setting TAG_SAVE_AS (Default: output/tag/tag_name’n’.html).

Variable	Description
tag	The name of the tag being processed
articles	Articles related to this tag
dates	Articles related to this tag, but ordered by date, ascending
articles_paginator	A paginator object for the list of articles
articles_page	The current page of articles
dates_paginator	A paginator object for the list of articles, ordered by date, ascending
dates_page	The current page of articles, ordered by date, ascending
page_name	TAG_URL where everything after {slug} is removed – useful for pagination links

Feeds¶

The feed variables changed in 3.0. Each variable now explicitly lists ATOM or RSS in the name. ATOM is still the default. Old themes will need to be updated. Here is a complete list of the feed variables:

FEED_ATOM
FEED_RSS
FEED_ALL_ATOM
FEED_ALL_RSS
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM
CATEGORY_FEED_RSS
TAG_FEED_ATOM
TAG_FEED_RSS
TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM
TRANSLATION_FEED_RSS

Inheritance¶

Since version 3.0, Pelican supports inheritance from the simple theme, so you can re-use the simple theme templates in your own themes.

If one of the mandatory files in the templates/ directory of your theme is missing, it will be replaced by the matching template from the simple theme. So if the HTML structure of a template in the simple theme is right for you, you don’t have to write a new template from scratch.

You can also extend templates from the simple themes in your own themes by using the {% extends %} directive as in the following example:

{% extends "!simple/index.html" %}   <!-- extends the ``index.html`` template from the ``simple`` theme -->

{% extends "index.html" %}   <!-- "regular" extending -->

Example¶

With this system, it is possible to create a theme with just two files.

base.html¶

The first file is the templates/base.html template:

{% extends "!simple/base.html" %}

{% block head %}
{{ super() }}
   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ SITEURL }}/theme/css/style.css" />
{% endblock %}

On the first line, we extend the base.html template from the simple theme, so we don’t have to rewrite the entire file.
On the third line, we open the head block which has already been defined in the simple theme.
On the fourth line, the function super() keeps the content previously inserted in the head block.
On the fifth line, we append a stylesheet to the page.
On the last line, we close the head block.

This file will be extended by all the other templates, so the stylesheet will be linked from all pages.

style.css¶

The second file is the static/css/style.css CSS stylesheet:

body {
    font-family : monospace ;
    font-size : 100% ;
    background-color : white ;
    color : #111 ;
    width : 80% ;
    min-width : 400px ;
    min-height : 200px ;
    padding : 1em ;
    margin : 5% 10% ;
    border : thin solid gray ;
    border-radius : 5px ;
    display : block ;
}

a:link    { color : blue ; text-decoration : none ;      }
a:hover   { color : blue ; text-decoration : underline ; }
a:visited { color : blue ;                               }

h1 a { color : inherit !important }
h2 a { color : inherit !important }
h3 a { color : inherit !important }
h4 a { color : inherit !important }
h5 a { color : inherit !important }
h6 a { color : inherit !important }

pre {
    margin : 2em 1em 2em 4em ;
}

#menu li {
    display : inline ;
}

#post-list {
    margin-bottom : 1em ;
    margin-top : 1em ;
}

Download¶

You can download this example theme here.