Converting an existing website to Pelican

[flowerbug]

Hello all,

Any help with the following is appreciated. :)

Short Version:

Is there any theme(s)/plugin(s) that will let me replicate my existing website in Pelican? c.f. anthive.com

Much Longer Version:

I am using fairly current version 4.11.0 of pelican on Debian testing (at python 3.13.2 for the moment) Most python modules I put in a virtual environment to avoid getting them mixed into the system python and also to help control when updates happen for the website development environment.

I'm getting older, it takes me some time to learn new things but I'm at a spot in time when I'd like to get my website converted and wondering if Pelican will work for me.

I'm not an experienced website developer so some concepts or words I may be using might be wrong or not well understood by me. I don't really do much with css, js, etc other than use them via a theme for my existing website. Eventually I will pick up the concepts but I hope to not have to spend a lot of time with those things if I can avoid it for starting out.

I do like how my current existing website looks and behaves and I would like to convert it from my existing static website generator and theme to one which will work with Pelican. As a part of that I either need to adapt an existing pelican theme or come up with a new one. And yes I've spent some time looking at and testing various themes but so far only a few seem to be coming close to what I am looking for (or I'm not able to see that the current themes are actually capable of what I want to do but the demos don't show the features clearly enough that I see them being available).

I do not like how the developers of my existing SWG and theme have locked in various aspects which make it harder for me to make updates using more recent versions of their themes or framework (so at the moment I'm stuck generating the website using an older version of the SWG).

My website is anthive.com, it has a main menu, some basic sections which are: about and biography and then some text before a list of tag words which are used to filter and display the projects and posts that follow then the contact info at the bottom and a footer and the usual copyright info.

There are two different kinds of things involving tags and they'd have to somehow be kept apart (filtering via selecting a tag vs. selecting a tag any other place).

Currently selecting a tag on any section or page other than the filtering (tag cloud?) brings up individual pages, but I'd be happy for that to all go onto one page only and to jump to that page when it is specifically selected but otherwise not visible or downloaded unless requested.

Pretty much the features I need from any existing theme in Pelican or a new theme is a static top menu (which seems possible from what I'm seeing so far). Tags (categories I don't use, but it would be ok if they were available as an option in the future) and a way to use them to filter projects and posts. I do not like drop down menus for selecting things.

Of course a responsive layout is desired (adjusting itself based upon how big the screen is), but also the filtering of selected projects and posts.

So far m.ccs seems to be the closest to what I'm looking for but it's pretty complicated and I'd want to pare it down quite a bit. Might take more time to remove things and figure out the settings and parts than what I really need.

I'm currently working on a basic bare skeleton website theme which I can plug the various parts into as I come across them. I have not yet put it in my github repositories but if I get far enough along and am happy with the direction then I would be glad to do that and make the results available to anyone.

As I am also not a git wizard and not super confident about how things work and it does often take me a while to get things set up how I want them. I have other projects I'm working on. I'm also older so it takes me more time to learn compared to what I could do as a younger person. And also I am taking care of an older parent plus keeping a lot of gardens so this may be a longer project than accomplished immediately. I am ok with that. :) It may take some time before I can get back to any replies. Patience is important. It may be a few years before I make much sense in some ways - I need a plugin for my brain :) .

In the meantime I'm experimenting and trying to learn Pelican concepts and seeing if I can make sense of it and also gradually getting a better understanding of the other parts involved in a moving ecosystem (bootstrap out and in with css.grid? react.js maybe not needed or is it for what I want? etc.) Simplification is very much a good thing.

Hung up for now:

So far I'm hung up on simple things like trying to get my root directory files from static properly placed and found. I sure don't want to have to set up a different entry in pelicanconf.py for each item or directory - is there a plugin which does that? It is not always easy to find plugins or themes that apply or work.

Sorry if this was long, but I'm more of a full context writer than shorter...

Last but not least:

Big thank you to:

pelican.plugins.yaml_metadata author

And all contributors and maintainers of Pelican, Docs and Themes... :)

[flowerbug]

I have made some progress on getting the basic items (two files placed in the root of the website plus the img directory) to be properly placed upon generation. The documentation was fine, I was not seeing something it was saying (my mistake).

Current Tasks I'm Looking At:

• I don't need Author or Category
• My top menu and directory structure is still not quite right
• I do not yet understand how to get projects set up apart from pages or articles (note that I am using project as a type of content which is distinct from page or article)
• Image handling (for my current method I only use one size of thumbnail and an image that I've edited and downsized from the raw images which are too large to upload).