Pelican

Pelican is a static site generator, written in Python.

  • Write your content directly with your editor of choice (vim!) in reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats
  • Includes a simple CLI tool to (re)generate your site
  • Easy to interface with distributed version control systems and web hooks
  • Completely static output is easy to host anywhere

Features

Pelican currently supports:

  • Articles (e.g., blog posts) and pages (e.g., “About”, “Projects”, “Contact”)
  • Comments, via an external service (Disqus). (Please note that while useful, Disqus is an external service, and thus the comment data will be somewhat outside of your control and potentially subject to data loss.)
  • Theming support (themes are created using Jinja2 templates)
  • Publication of articles in multiple languages
  • Atom/RSS feeds
  • Code syntax highlighting
  • PDF generation of the articles/pages (optional)
  • Import from WordPress, Dotclear, or RSS feeds
  • Integration with external tools: Twitter, Google Analytics, etc. (optional)

Why the name “Pelican”?

“Pelican” is an anagram for calepin, which means “notebook” in French. ;)

Source code

You can access the source code at: https://github.com/getpelican/pelican

Feedback / Contact us

If you want to see new features in Pelican, don’t hesitate to offer suggestions, clone the repository, etc. There are many ways to contribute. That’s open source, dude!

Send a message to “authors at getpelican dot com” with any requests/feedback! You can also join the team at #pelican on Freenode (or if you don’t have an IRC client handy, use the webchat for quick feedback.

Documentation

A French version of the documentation is available at Pelican.

Getting started

Installing Pelican

Pelican currently runs best on Python 2.7.x; earlier versions of Python are not supported. There is provisional support for Python 3.2 and higher, although there may be rough edges, particularly with regards to optional 3rd-party components.

You can install Pelican via several different methods. The simplest is via pip:

$ pip install pelican

If you don’t have pip installed, an alternative method is easy_install:

$ easy_install pelican

(Keep in mind that operating systems will often require you to prefix the above commands with sudo in order to install Pelican system-wide.)

While the above is the simplest method, the recommended approach is to create a virtual environment for Pelican via virtualenv before installing Pelican. Assuming you have virtualenv installed, you can then open a new terminal session and create a new virtual environment for Pelican:

$ virtualenv ~/virtualenvs/pelican
$ cd ~/virtualenvs/pelican
$ . bin/activate

Once the virtual environment has been created and activated, Pelican can be be installed via pip install pelican as noted above. Alternatively, if you have the project source, you can install Pelican using the distutils method:

$ cd path-to-Pelican-source
$ python setup.py install

If you have Git installed and prefer to install the latest bleeding-edge version of Pelican rather than a stable release, use the following command:

$ pip install -e git://github.com/getpelican/pelican#egg=pelican

If you plan on using Markdown as a markup format, you’ll need to install the Markdown library as well:

$ pip install Markdown

If you want to use AsciiDoc you need to install it from source or use your operating system’s package manager.

Basic usage

Once Pelican is installed, you can use it to convert your Markdown or reST content into HTML via the pelican command, specifying the path to your content and (optionally) the path to your settings file:

$ pelican /path/to/your/content/ [-s path/to/your/settings.py]

The above command will generate your site and save it in the output/ folder, using the default theme to produce a simple site. The default theme consists of very simple HTML without styling and is provided so folks may use it as a basis for creating their own themes.

You can also tell Pelican to watch for your modifications, instead of manually re-running it every time you want to see your changes. To enable this, run the pelican command with the -r or --autoreload option.

Pelican has other command-line switches available. Have a look at the help to see all the options you can use:

$ pelican --help

Continue reading below for more detail, and check out the Pelican wiki’s Tutorials page for links to community-published tutorials.

Viewing the generated files

The files generated by Pelican are static files, so you don’t actually need anything special to view them. You can either use your browser to open the files on your disk:

firefox output/index.html

Or run a simple web server using Python:

cd output && python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Upgrading

If you installed a stable Pelican release via pip or easy_install and wish to upgrade to the latest stable release, you can do so by adding --upgrade to the relevant command. For pip, that would be:

$ pip install --upgrade pelican

If you installed Pelican via distutils or the bleeding-edge method, simply perform the same step to install the most recent version.

Dependencies

When Pelican is installed, the following dependent Python packages should be automatically installed without any action on your part:

  • feedgenerator, to generate the Atom feeds
  • jinja2, for templating support
  • pygments, for syntax highlighting
  • docutils, for supporting reStructuredText as an input format
  • pytz, for timezone definitions
  • blinker, an object-to-object and broadcast signaling system
  • unidecode, for ASCII transliterations of Unicode text

If you want the following optional packages, you will need to install them manually via pip:

  • markdown, for supporting Markdown as an input format
  • typogrify, for typographical enhancements

Kickstart your site

Once Pelican has been installed, you can create a skeleton project via the pelican-quickstart command, which begins by asking some questions about your site:

$ pelican-quickstart

Once you finish answering all the questions, your project will consist of the following hierarchy (except for “pages”, which you can optionally add yourself if you plan to create non-chronological content):

yourproject/
├── content
│   └── (pages)
├── output
├── develop_server.sh
├── Makefile
├── pelicanconf.py       # Main settings file
└── publishconf.py       # Settings to use when ready to publish

The next step is to begin to adding content to the content folder that has been created for you. (See Writing articles using Pelican section below for more information about how to format your content.)

Once you have written some content to generate, you can use the pelican command to generate your site, which will be placed in the output folder. Alternatively, you can use automation tools that “wrap” the pelican command to simplify the process of generating, previewing, and uploading your site. One such tool is the Makefile that’s automatically created for you when you use pelican-quickstart to create a skeleton project. To use make to generate your site, run:

$ make html

If you’d prefer to have Pelican automatically regenerate your site every time a change is detected (which is handy when testing locally), use the following command instead:

$ make regenerate

To serve the generated site so it can be previewed in your browser at http://localhost:8000:

$ make serve

Normally you would need to run make regenerate and make serve in two separate terminal sessions, but you can run both at once via:

$ make devserver

The above command will simultaneously run Pelican in regeneration mode as well as serve the output at http://localhost:8000. Once you are done testing your changes, you should stop the development server via:

$ ./develop_server.sh stop

When you’re ready to publish your site, you can upload it via the method(s) you chose during the pelican-quickstart questionnaire. For this example, we’ll use rsync over ssh:

$ make rsync_upload

That’s it! Your site should now be live.

Writing content using Pelican

Articles and pages

Pelican considers “articles” to be chronological content, such as posts on a blog, and thus associated with a date.

The idea behind “pages” is that they are usually not temporal in nature and are used for content that does not change very often (e.g., “About” or “Contact” pages).

File metadata

Pelican tries to be smart enough to get the information it needs from the file system (for instance, about the category of your articles), but some information you need to provide in the form of metadata inside your files.

If you are writing your content in reStructuredText format, you can provide this metadata in text files via the following syntax (give your file the .rst extension):

My super title
##############

:date: 2010-10-03 10:20
:tags: thats, awesome
:category: yeah
:slug: my-super-post
:author: Alexis Metaireau
:summary: Short version for index and feeds

Pelican implements an extension to reStructuredText to enable support for the abbr HTML tag. To use it, write something like this in your post:

This will be turned into :abbr:`HTML (HyperText Markup Language)`.

You can also use Markdown syntax (with a file ending in .md, .markdown, .mkd, or .mdown). Markdown generation requires that you first explicitly install the Markdown package, which can be done via pip install Markdown. Metadata syntax for Markdown posts should follow this pattern:

Title: My super title
Date: 2010-12-03 10:20
Category: Python
Tags: pelican, publishing
Slug: my-super-post
Author: Alexis Metaireau
Summary: Short version for index and feeds

This is the content of my super blog post.

Pelican can also process HTML files ending in .html and .htm. Pelican interprets the HTML in a very straightforward manner, reading metadata from meta tags, the title from the title tag, and the body out from the body tag:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>My super title</title>
        <meta name="tags" contents="thats, awesome" />
        <meta name="date" contents="2012-07-09 22:28" />
        <meta name="category" contents="yeah" />
        <meta name="author" contents="Alexis Métaireau" />
        <meta name="summary" contents="Short version for index and feeds" />
    </head>
    <body>
        This is the content of my super blog post.
    </body>
</html>

With HTML, there is one simple exception to the standard metadata: tags can be specified either via the tags metadata, as is standard in Pelican, or via the keywords metadata, as is standard in HTML. The two can be used interchangeably.

Note that, aside from the title, none of this article metadata is mandatory: if the date is not specified and DEFAULT_DATE is set to fs, Pelican will rely on the file’s “mtime” timestamp, and the category can be determined by the directory in which the file resides. For example, a file located at python/foobar/myfoobar.rst will have a category of foobar. If you would like to organize your files in other ways where the name of the subfolder would not be a good category name, you can set the setting USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY to False.

If you do not explicitly specify summary metadata for a given post, the SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH setting can be used to specify how many words from the beginning of an article are used as the summary.

You can also extract any metadata from the filename through a regular expression to be set in the FILENAME_METADATA setting. All named groups that are matched will be set in the metadata object. The default value for the FILENAME_METADATA setting will only extract the date from the filename. For example, if you would like to extract both the date and the slug, you could set something like: '(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'

Please note that the metadata available inside your files takes precedence over the metadata extracted from the filename.

Pages

If you create a folder named pages inside the content folder, all the files in it will be used to generate static pages, such as About or Contact pages. (See example filesystem layout below.)

You can use the DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU setting to control whether all those pages are displayed in the primary navigation menu. (Default is True.)

If you want to exclude any pages from being linked to or listed in the menu then add a status: hidden attribute to its metadata. This is useful for things like making error pages that fit the generated theme of your site.

Linking to internal content

From Pelican 3.1 onwards, it is now possible to specify intra-site links to files in the source content hierarchy instead of files in the generated hierarchy. This makes it easier to link from the current post to other posts and images that may be sitting alongside the current post (instead of having to determine where those resources will be placed after site generation).

To link to internal content (files in the content directory), use the following syntax: |filename|path/to/file:

website/
├── content
│   ├── article1.rst
│   ├── cat/
│   │   └── article2.md
│   └── pages
│       └── about.md
└── pelican.conf.py

In this example, article1.rst could look like:

The first article
#################

:date: 2012-12-01 10:02

See below intra-site link examples in reStructuredText format.

`a link relative to content root <|filename|/cat/article2.md>`_
`a link relative to current file <|filename|cat/article2.md>`_

and article2.md:

Title: The second article
Date: 2012-12-01 10:02

See below intra-site link examples in Markdown format.

[a link relative to content root](|filename|/article1.rst)
[a link relative to current file](|filename|../article1.rst)

Embedding non-article or non-page content is slightly different in that the directories need to be specified in pelicanconf.py file. The images directory is configured for this by default but others will need to be added manually:

content
├── images
│   └── han.jpg
└── misc
    └── image-test.md

And image-test.md would include:

![Alt Text](|filename|/images/han.jpg)

Any content can be linked in this way. What happens is that the images directory gets copied to output/static/ upon publishing. This is because images is in the settings["STATIC_PATHS"] list by default. If you want to have another directory, say pdfs you would need to add the following to pelicanconf.py:

STATIC_PATHS = ['images', 'pdfs']

And then the pdfs directory would also be copied to output/static/.

Importing an existing blog

It is possible to import your blog from Dotclear, WordPress, and RSS feeds using a simple script. See Import from other blog software.

Translations

It is possible to translate articles. To do so, you need to add a lang meta attribute to your articles/pages and set a DEFAULT_LANG setting (which is English [en] by default). With those settings in place, only articles with the default language will be listed, and each article will be accompanied by a list of available translations for that article.

Pelican uses the article’s URL “slug” to determine if two or more articles are translations of one another. The slug can be set manually in the file’s metadata; if not set explicitly, Pelican will auto-generate the slug from the title of the article.

Here is an example of two articles, one in English and the other in French.

The English article:

Foobar is not dead
##################

:slug: foobar-is-not-dead
:lang: en

That's true, foobar is still alive!

And the French version:

Foobar n'est pas mort !
#######################

:slug: foobar-is-not-dead
:lang: fr

Oui oui, foobar est toujours vivant !

Post content quality notwithstanding, you can see that only item in common between the two articles is the slug, which is functioning here as an identifier. If you’d rather not explicitly define the slug this way, you must then instead ensure that the translated article titles are identical, since the slug will be auto-generated from the article title.

If you do not want the original version of one specific article to be detected by the DEFAULT_LANG setting, use the translation metadata to specify which posts are translations:

Foobar is not dead
##################

:slug: foobar-is-not-dead
:lang: en
:translation: true

That's true, foobar is still alive!
Syntax highlighting

Pelican is able to provide colorized syntax highlighting for your code blocks. To do so, you have to use the following conventions inside your content files.

For reStructuredText, use the code-block directive:

.. code-block:: identifier

   <indented code block goes here>

For Markdown, include the language identifier just above the code block, indenting both the identifier and code:

A block of text.

    :::identifier
    <code goes here>

The specified identifier (e.g. python, ruby) should be one that appears on the list of available lexers.

Publishing drafts

If you want to publish an article as a draft (for friends to review before publishing, for example), you can add a status: draft attribute to its metadata. That article will then be output to the drafts folder and not listed on the index page nor on any category page.

Settings

Pelican is configurable thanks to a configuration file you can pass to the command line:

$ pelican -s path/to/your/settingsfile.py path

Settings are configured in the form of a Python module (a file). You can see an example by looking at /samples/pelican.conf.py

All the setting identifiers must be set in all-caps, otherwise they will not be processed. Setting values that are numbers (5, 20, etc.), booleans (True, False, None, etc.), dictionaries, or tuples should not be enclosed in quotation marks. All other values (i.e., strings) must be enclosed in quotation marks.

Unless otherwise specified, settings that refer to paths can be either absolute or relative to the configuration file.

The settings you define in the configuration file will be passed to the templates, which allows you to use your settings to add site-wide content.

Here is a list of settings for Pelican:

Basic settings

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
AUTHOR Default author (put your name)
DATE_FORMATS ({}) If you manage multiple languages, you can set the date formatting here. See the “Date format and locales” section below for details.
USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY (True) When you don’t specify a category in your post metadata, set this setting to True, and organize your articles in subfolders, the subfolder will become the category of your post. If set to False, DEFAULT_CATEGORY will be used as a fallback.
DEFAULT_CATEGORY ('misc') The default category to fall back on.
DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT ('%a %d %B %Y') The default date format you want to use.
DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU (True) Whether to display pages on the menu of the template. Templates may or may not honor this setting.
DISPLAY_CATEGORIES_ON_MENU (True) Whether to display categories on the menu of the template. Templates may or not honor this setting.
DEFAULT_DATE (None) The default date you want to use. If fs, Pelican will use the file system timestamp information (mtime) if it can’t get date information from the metadata. If set to a tuple object, the default datetime object will instead be generated by passing the tuple to the datetime.datetime constructor.
DEFAULT_METADATA (()) The default metadata you want to use for all articles and pages.
FILENAME_METADATA ('(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}).*') The regexp that will be used to extract any metadata from the filename. All named groups that are matched will be set in the metadata object. The default value will only extract the date from the filename. For example, if you would like to extract both the date and the slug, you could set something like: '(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'.
PATH_METADATA ('') Like FILENAME_METADATA, but parsed from a page’s full path relative to the content source directory.
DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY (False) Delete the content of the output directory before generating new files.
FILES_TO_COPY (()) A list of files (or directories) to copy from the source (inside the content directory) to the destination (inside the output directory). For example: (('extra/robots.txt', 'robots.txt'),).
JINJA_EXTENSIONS ([]) A list of any Jinja2 extensions you want to use.
JINJA_FILTERS ({}) A list of custom Jinja2 filters you want to use. The dictionary should map the filtername to the filter function. For example: {'urlencode': urlencode_filter} See Jinja custom filters documentation.
LOCALE (‘’[1]) Change the locale. A list of locales can be provided here or a single string representing one locale. When providing a list, all the locales will be tried until one works.
MARKUP (('rst', 'md')) A list of available markup languages you want to use. For the moment, the only available values are rst, md, markdown, mkd, mdown, html, and htm.
IGNORE_FILES (['.#*']) A list of file globbing patterns to match against the source files to be ignored by the processor. For example, the default ['.#*'] will ignore emacs lock files.
MD_EXTENSIONS (['codehilite(css_class=highlight)','extra']) A list of the extensions that the Markdown processor will use. Refer to the Python Markdown documentation’s Extensions section for a complete list of supported extensions. (Note that defining this in your settings file will override and replace the default values. If your goal is to add to the default values for this setting, you’ll need to include them explicitly and enumerate the full list of desired Markdown extensions.)
OUTPUT_PATH ('output/') Where to output the generated files.
PATH (None) Path to content directory to be processed by Pelican.
PAGE_DIR ('pages') Directory to look at for pages, relative to PATH.
PAGE_EXCLUDES (()) A list of directories to exclude when looking for pages.
ARTICLE_DIR ('') Directory to look at for articles, relative to PATH.
ARTICLE_EXCLUDES: (('pages',)) A list of directories to exclude when looking for articles.
PDF_GENERATOR (False) Set to True if you want PDF versions of your documents to be. generated. You will need to install rst2pdf.
OUTPUT_SOURCES (False) Set to True if you want to copy the articles and pages in their original format (e.g. Markdown or reStructuredText) to the specified OUTPUT_PATH.
OUTPUT_SOURCES_EXTENSION (.text) Controls the extension that will be used by the SourcesGenerator. Defaults to .text. If not a valid string the default value will be used.
RELATIVE_URLS (False) Defines whether Pelican should use document-relative URLs or not. Only set this to True when developing/testing and only if you fully understand the effect it can have on links/feeds.
PLUGINS ([]) The list of plugins to load. See Plugins.
SITENAME ('A Pelican Blog') Your site name
SITEURL Base URL of your website. Not defined by default, so it is best to specify your SITEURL; if you do not, feeds will not be generated with properly-formed URLs. You should include http:// and your domain, with no trailing slash at the end. Example: SITEURL = 'http://mydomain.com'
TEMPLATE_PAGES (None) A mapping containing template pages that will be rendered with the blog entries. See Template pages.
STATIC_PATHS (['images']) The static paths you want to have accessible on the output path “static”. By default, Pelican will copy the “images” folder to the output folder.
TIMEZONE The timezone used in the date information, to generate Atom and RSS feeds. See the Timezone section below for more info.
TYPOGRIFY (False) If set to True, several typographical improvements will be incorporated into the generated HTML via the Typogrify library, which can be installed via: pip install typogrify
DIRECT_TEMPLATES (('index', 'tags', 'categories', 'archives')) List of templates that are used directly to render content. Typically direct templates are used to generate index pages for collections of content (e.g. tags and category index pages).
PAGINATED_DIRECT_TEMPLATES (('index',)) Provides the direct templates that should be paginated.
SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH (50) When creating a short summary of an article, this will be the default length in words of the text created. This only applies if your content does not otherwise specify a summary. Setting to None will cause the summary to be a copy of the original content.
EXTRA_TEMPLATES_PATHS ([]) A list of paths you want Jinja2 to search for templates. Can be used to separate templates from the theme. Example: projects, resume, profile ... These templates need to use DIRECT_TEMPLATES setting.
ASCIIDOC_OPTIONS ([]) A list of options to pass to AsciiDoc. See the manpage
[1]Default is the system locale.
URL settings

The first thing to understand is that there are currently two supported methods for URL formation: relative and absolute. Document-relative URLs are useful when testing locally, and absolute URLs are reliable and most useful when publishing. One method of supporting both is to have one Pelican configuration file for local development and another for publishing. To see an example of this type of setup, use the pelican-quickstart script as described at the top of the Getting Started page, which will produce two separate configuration files for local development and publishing, respectively.

You can customize the URLs and locations where files will be saved. The URLs and SAVE_AS variables use Python’s format strings. These variables allow you to place your articles in a location such as {slug}/index.html and link to them as {slug} for clean URLs. These settings give you the flexibility to place your articles and pages anywhere you want.

Note

If you specify a datetime directive, it will be substituted using the input files’ date metadata attribute. If the date is not specified for a particular file, Pelican will rely on the file’s mtime timestamp.

Check the Python datetime documentation at http://bit.ly/cNcJUC for more information.

Also, you can use other file metadata attributes as well:

  • slug
  • date
  • lang
  • author
  • category

Example usage:

  • ARTICLE_URL = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/{date:%d}/{slug}/'
  • ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/{date:%d}/{slug}/index.html'

This would save your articles in something like /posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/index.html, and the URL to this would be /posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/.

Pelican can optionally create per-year, per-month, and per-day archives of your posts. These secondary archives are disabled by default but are automatically enabled if you supply format strings for their respective _SAVE_AS settings. Period archives fit intuitively with the hierarchical model of web URLs and can make it easier for readers to navigate through the posts you’ve written over time.

Example usage:

  • YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/index.html'
  • MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/index.html'

With these settings, Pelican will create an archive of all your posts for the year at (for instance) ‘posts/2011/index.html’, and an archive of all your posts for the month at ‘posts/2011/Aug/index.html’.

Note

Period archives work best when the final path segment is ‘index.html’. This way a reader can remove a portion of your URL and automatically arrive at an appropriate archive of posts, without having to specify a page name.

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
ARTICLE_URL ('{slug}.html') The URL to refer to an ARTICLE.
ARTICLE_SAVE_AS ('{slug}.html') The place where we will save an article.
ARTICLE_LANG_URL ('{slug}-{lang}.html') The URL to refer to an ARTICLE which doesn’t use the default language.
ARTICLE_LANG_SAVE_AS ('{slug}-{lang}.html') The place where we will save an article which doesn’t use the default language.
PAGE_URL ('pages/{slug}.html') The URL we will use to link to a page.
PAGE_SAVE_AS ('pages/{slug}.html') The location we will save the page. This value has to be the same as PAGE_URL or you need to use a rewrite in your server config.
PAGE_LANG_URL ('pages/{slug}-{lang}.html') The URL we will use to link to a page which doesn’t use the default language.
PAGE_LANG_SAVE_AS ('pages/{slug}-{lang}.html') The location we will save the page which doesn’t use the default language.
AUTHOR_URL ('author/{slug}.html') The URL to use for an author.
AUTHOR_SAVE_AS ('author/{slug}.html') The location to save an author.
CATEGORY_URL ('category/{slug}.html') The URL to use for a category.
CATEGORY_SAVE_AS ('category/{slug}.html') The location to save a category.
TAG_URL ('tag/{slug}.html') The URL to use for a tag.
TAG_SAVE_AS ('tag/{slug}.html') The location to save the tag page.
<DIRECT_TEMPLATE_NAME>_SAVE_AS The location to save content generated from direct templates. Where <DIRECT_TEMPLATE_NAME> is the upper case template name.
YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS (False) The location to save per-year archives of your posts.
MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS (False) The location to save per-month archives of your posts.
DAY_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS (False) The location to save per-day archives of your posts.

Note

When any of the *_SAVE_AS settings is set to False, files will not be created.

Timezone

If no timezone is defined, UTC is assumed. This means that the generated Atom and RSS feeds will contain incorrect date information if your locale is not UTC.

Pelican issues a warning in case this setting is not defined, as it was not mandatory in previous versions.

Have a look at the wikipedia page to get a list of valid timezone values.

Date format and locale

If no DATE_FORMATS are set, Pelican will fall back to DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT. If you need to maintain multiple languages with different date formats, you can set this dict using the language name (lang metadata in your post content) as the key. Regarding available format codes, see strftime document of python :

DATE_FORMATS = {
    'en': '%a, %d %b %Y',
    'jp': '%Y-%m-%d(%a)',
}

You can set locale to further control date format:

LOCALE = ('usa', 'jpn',  # On Windows
    'en_US', 'ja_JP'     # On Unix/Linux
    )

Also, it is possible to set different locale settings for each language. If you put (locale, format) tuples in the dict, this will override the LOCALE setting above:

# On Unix/Linux
DATE_FORMATS = {
    'en': ('en_US','%a, %d %b %Y'),
    'jp': ('ja_JP','%Y-%m-%d(%a)'),
}

# On Windows
DATE_FORMATS = {
    'en': ('usa','%a, %d %b %Y'),
    'jp': ('jpn','%Y-%m-%d(%a)'),
}

This is a list of available locales on Windows . On Unix/Linux, usually you can get a list of available locales via the locale -a command; see manpage locale(1) for more information.

Template pages

If you want to generate custom pages besides your blog entries, you can point any Jinja2 template file with a path pointing to the file and the destination path for the generated file.

For instance, if you have a blog with three static pages — a list of books, your resume, and a contact page — you could have:

TEMPLATE_PAGES = {'src/books.html': 'dest/books.html',
                  'src/resume.html': 'dest/resume.html',
                  'src/contact.html': 'dest/contact.html'}

Feed settings

By default, Pelican uses Atom feeds. However, it is also possible to use RSS feeds if you prefer.

Pelican generates category feeds as well as feeds for all your articles. It does not generate feeds for tags by default, but it is possible to do so using the TAG_FEED_ATOM and TAG_FEED_RSS settings:

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
FEED_DOMAIN (None, i.e. base URL is “/”) The domain prepended to feed URLs. Since feed URLs should always be absolute, it is highly recommended to define this (e.g., “http://feeds.example.com”). If you have already explicitly defined SITEURL (see above) and want to use the same domain for your feeds, you can just set: FEED_DOMAIN = SITEURL.
FEED_ATOM (None, i.e. no Atom feed) Relative URL to output the Atom feed.
FEED_RSS (None, i.e. no RSS) Relative URL to output the RSS feed.
FEED_ALL_ATOM ('feeds/all.atom.xml') Relative URL to output the all posts Atom feed: this feed will contain all posts regardless of their language.
FEED_ALL_RSS (None, i.e. no all RSS) Relative URL to output the all posts RSS feed: this feed will contain all posts regardless of their language.
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM (‘feeds/%s.atom.xml’[2]) Where to put the category Atom feeds.
CATEGORY_FEED_RSS (None, i.e. no RSS) Where to put the category RSS feeds.
TAG_FEED_ATOM (None, i.e. no tag feed) Relative URL to output the tag Atom feed. It should be defined using a “%s” match in the tag name.
TAG_FEED_RSS (None, ie no RSS tag feed) Relative URL to output the tag RSS feed
FEED_MAX_ITEMS Maximum number of items allowed in a feed. Feed item quantity is unrestricted by default.

If you don’t want to generate some or any of these feeds, set the above variables to None.

[2]%s is the name of the category.
FeedBurner

If you want to use FeedBurner for your feed, you will likely need to decide upon a unique identifier. For example, if your site were called “Thyme” and hosted on the www.example.com domain, you might use “thymefeeds” as your unique identifier, which we’ll use throughout this section for illustrative purposes. In your Pelican settings, set the FEED_ATOM attribute to “thymefeeds/main.xml” to create an Atom feed with an original address of http://www.example.com/thymefeeds/main.xml. Set the FEED_DOMAIN attribute to http://feeds.feedburner.com, or http://feeds.example.com if you are using a CNAME on your own domain (i.e., FeedBurner’s “MyBrand” feature).

There are two fields to configure in the FeedBurner interface: “Original Feed” and “Feed Address”. In this example, the “Original Feed” would be http://www.example.com/thymefeeds/main.xml and the “Feed Address” suffix would be thymefeeds/main.xml.

Tag cloud

If you want to generate a tag cloud with all your tags, you can do so using the following settings.

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
TAG_CLOUD_STEPS (4) Count of different font sizes in the tag cloud.
TAG_CLOUD_MAX_ITEMS (100) Maximum number of tags in the cloud.

The default theme does not support tag clouds, but it is pretty easy to add:

<ul>
    {% for tag in tag_cloud %}
        <li class="tag-{{ tag.1 }}"><a href="/tag/{{ tag.0|string|replace(" ", "-" ) }}.html">{{ tag.0 }}</a></li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>

You should then also define a CSS style with the appropriate classes (tag-0 to tag-N, where N matches TAG_CLOUD_STEPS -1).

Translations

Pelican offers a way to translate articles. See the Getting Started section for more information.

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
DEFAULT_LANG ('en') The default language to use.
TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM (‘feeds/all-%s.atom.xml’[3]) Where to put the Atom feed for translations.
TRANSLATION_FEED_RSS (None, i.e. no RSS) Where to put the RSS feed for translations.
[3]%s is the language

Ordering content

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
NEWEST_FIRST_ARCHIVES (True) Order archives by newest first by date. (False: orders by date with older articles first.)
REVERSE_CATEGORY_ORDER (False) Reverse the category order. (True: lists by reverse alphabetical order; default lists alphabetically.)

Themes

Creating Pelican themes is addressed in a dedicated section (see How to create themes for Pelican). However, here are the settings that are related to themes.

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
THEME Theme to use to produce the output. Can be a relative or absolute path to a theme folder, or the name of a default theme or a theme installed via pelican-themes (see below).
THEME_STATIC_PATHS (['static']) Static theme paths you want to copy. Default value is static, but if your theme has other static paths, you can put them here.
CSS_FILE ('main.css') Specify the CSS file you want to load.

By default, two themes are available. You can specify them using the THEME setting or by passing the -t option to the pelican command:

  • notmyidea
  • simple (a synonym for “plain text” :)

There are a number of other themes available at http://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes. Pelican comes with pelican-themes, a small script for managing themes.

You can define your own theme, either by starting from scratch or by duplicating and modifying a pre-existing theme. Here is a guide on how to create your theme.

Following are example ways to specify your preferred theme:

# Specify name of a built-in theme
THEME = "notmyidea"
# Specify name of a theme installed via the pelican-themes tool
THEME = "chunk"
# Specify a customized theme, via path relative to the settings file
THEME = "themes/mycustomtheme"
# Specify a customized theme, via absolute path
THEME = "~/projects/mysite/themes/mycustomtheme"

The built-in notmyidea theme can make good use of the following settings. Feel free to use them in your themes as well.

Setting name What does it do ?
SITESUBTITLE A subtitle to appear in the header.
DISQUS_SITENAME Pelican can handle Disqus comments. Specify the Disqus sitename identifier here.
GITHUB_URL Your GitHub URL (if you have one). It will then use this information to create a GitHub ribbon.
GOOGLE_ANALYTICS ‘UA-XXXX-YYYY’ to activate Google Analytics.
GOSQUARED_SITENAME ‘XXX-YYYYYY-X’ to activate GoSquared.
MENUITEMS A list of tuples (Title, URL) for additional menu items to appear at the beginning of the main menu.
PIWIK_URL URL to your Piwik server - without ‘http://‘ at the beginning.
PIWIK_SSL_URL If the SSL-URL differs from the normal Piwik-URL you have to include this setting too. (optional)
PIWIK_SITE_ID ID for the monitored website. You can find the ID in the Piwik admin interface > settings > websites.
LINKS A list of tuples (Title, URL) for links to appear on the header.
SOCIAL A list of tuples (Title, URL) to appear in the “social” section.
TWITTER_USERNAME Allows for adding a button to articles to encourage others to tweet about them. Add your Twitter username if you want this button to appear.

In addition, you can use the “wide” version of the notmyidea theme by adding the following to your configuration:

CSS_FILE = "wide.css"

Example settings

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import unicode_literals

AUTHOR = 'Alexis Métaireau'
SITENAME = "Alexis' log"
SITEURL = 'http://blog.notmyidea.org'
TIMEZONE = "Europe/Paris"

# can be useful in development, but set to False when you're ready to publish
RELATIVE_URLS = True

GITHUB_URL = 'http://github.com/ametaireau/'
DISQUS_SITENAME = "blog-notmyidea"
PDF_GENERATOR = False
REVERSE_CATEGORY_ORDER = True
LOCALE = "C"
DEFAULT_PAGINATION = 4
DEFAULT_DATE = (2012, 3, 2, 14, 1, 1)

FEED_ALL_RSS = 'feeds/all.rss.xml'
CATEGORY_FEED_RSS = 'feeds/%s.rss.xml'

LINKS = (('Biologeek', 'http://biologeek.org'),
         ('Filyb', "http://filyb.info/"),
         ('Libert-fr', "http://www.libert-fr.com"),
         ('N1k0', "http://prendreuncafe.com/blog/"),
         ('Tarek Ziadé', "http://ziade.org/blog"),
         ('Zubin Mithra', "http://zubin71.wordpress.com/"),)

SOCIAL = (('twitter', 'http://twitter.com/ametaireau'),
          ('lastfm', 'http://lastfm.com/user/akounet'),
          ('github', 'http://github.com/ametaireau'),)

# global metadata to all the contents
DEFAULT_METADATA = (('yeah', 'it is'),)

# static paths will be copied under the same name
STATIC_PATHS = ["pictures", ]

# A list of files to copy from the source to the destination
FILES_TO_COPY = (('extra/robots.txt', 'robots.txt'),)

# custom page generated with a jinja2 template
TEMPLATE_PAGES = {'pages/jinja2_template.html': 'jinja2_template.html'}

# foobar will not be used, because it's not in caps. All configuration keys
# have to be in caps
foobar = "barbaz"

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 %}
  1. On the first line, we extend the base.html template from the simple theme, so we don’t have to rewrite the entire file.
  2. On the third line, we open the head block which has already been defined in the simple theme.
  3. On the fourth line, the function super() keeps the content previously inserted in the head block.
  4. On the fifth line, we append a stylesheet to the page.
  5. 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.

Plugins

Beginning with version 3.0, Pelican supports plugins. Plugins are a way to add features to Pelican without having to directly modify the Pelican core.

How to use plugins

To load plugins, you have to specify them in your settings file. There are two ways to do so. The first method is to specify strings with the path to the callables:

PLUGINS = ['package.myplugin',]

Alternatively, another method is to import them and add them to the list:

from package import myplugin
PLUGINS = [myplugin,]

If your plugins are not in an importable path, you can specify a PLUGIN_PATH in the settings. PLUGIN_PATH can be an absolute path or a path relative to the settings file:

PLUGIN_PATH = "plugins"
PLUGINS = ["list", "of", "plugins"]

Where to find plugins

We maintain a separate repository of plugins for people to share and use. Please visit the pelican-plugins repository for a list of available plugins.

Please note that while we do our best to review and maintain these plugins, they are submitted by the Pelican community and thus may have varying levels of support and interoperability.

How to create plugins

Plugins are based on the concept of signals. Pelican sends signals, and plugins subscribe to those signals. The list of signals are defined in a subsequent section.

The only rule to follow for plugins is to define a register callable, in which you map the signals to your plugin logic. Let’s take a simple example:

from pelican import signals

def test(sender):
    print "%s initialized !!" % sender

def register():
    signals.initialized.connect(test)

List of signals

Here is the list of currently implemented signals:

Signal Arguments Description
initialized pelican object  
finalized pelican object invoked after all the generators are executed and just before pelican exits usefull for custom post processing actions, such as: - minifying js/css assets. - notify/ping search engines with an updated sitemap.
generator_init generator invoked in the Generator.__init__
article_generate_context article_generator, metadata  
article_generate_preread article_generator invoked before a article is read in ArticlesGenerator.generate_context; use if code needs to do something before every article is parsed
article_generator_init article_generator invoked in the ArticlesGenerator.__init__
article_generator_finalized article_generator invoked at the end of ArticlesGenerator.generate_context
get_generators generators invoked in Pelican.get_generator_classes, can return a Generator, or several generator in a tuple or in a list.
pages_generate_context pages_generator, metadata  
pages_generator_init pages_generator invoked in the PagesGenerator.__init__
pages_generator_finalized pages_generator invoked at the end of PagesGenerator.generate_context
content_object_init content_object invoked at the end of Content.__init__ (see note below)

The list is currently small, so don’t hesitate to add signals and make a pull request if you need them!

Note

The signal content_object_init can send a different type of object as the argument. If you want to register only one type of object then you will need to specify the sender when you are connecting to the signal.

from pelican import signals
from pelican import contents

def test(sender, instance):
        print "%s : %s content initialized !!" % (sender, instance)

def register():
        signals.content_object_init.connect(test, sender=contents.Article)

Pelican internals

This section describe how Pelican works internally. As you’ll see, it’s quite simple, but a bit of documentation doesn’t hurt. :)

You can also find in the Some history about Pelican section an excerpt of a report the original author wrote with some software design information.

Overall structure

What Pelican does is take a list of files and process them into some sort of output. Usually, the input files are reStructuredText, Markdown and AsciiDoc files, and the output is a blog, but both input and output can be anything you want.

The logic is separated into different classes and concepts:

  • Writers are responsible for writing files: .html files, RSS feeds, and so on. Since those operations are commonly used, the object is created once and then passed to the generators.
  • Readers are used to read from various formats (AsciiDoc, HTML, Markdown and reStructuredText for now, but the system is extensible). Given a file, they return metadata (author, tags, category, etc.) and content (HTML-formatted).
  • Generators generate the different outputs. For instance, Pelican comes with ArticlesGenerator and PageGenerator. Given a configuration, they can do whatever they want. Most of the time, it’s generating files from inputs.
  • Pelican also uses templates, so it’s easy to write your own theme. The syntax is Jinja2 and is very easy to learn, so don’t hesitate to jump in and build your own theme.

How to implement a new reader?

Is there an awesome markup language you want to add to Pelican? Well, the only thing you have to do is to create a class with a read method that returns HTML content and some metadata.

Take a look at the Markdown reader:

class MarkdownReader(Reader):
    enabled = bool(Markdown)

    def read(self, source_path):
        """Parse content and metadata of markdown files"""
        text = pelican_open(source_path)
        md = Markdown(extensions = ['meta', 'codehilite'])
        content = md.convert(text)

        metadata = {}
        for name, value in md.Meta.items():
            name = name.lower()
            meta = self.process_metadata(name, value[0])
            metadata[name] = meta
        return content, metadata

Simple, isn’t it?

If your new reader requires additional Python dependencies, then you should wrap their import statements in a try...except block. Then inside the reader’s class, set the enabled class attribute to mark import success or failure. This makes it possible for users to continue using their favourite markup method without needing to install modules for formats they don’t use.

How to implement a new generator?

Generators have two important methods. You’re not forced to create both; only the existing ones will be called.

  • generate_context, that is called first, for all the generators. Do whatever you have to do, and update the global context if needed. This context is shared between all generators, and will be passed to the templates. For instance, the PageGenerator generate_context method finds all the pages, transforms them into objects, and populates the context with them. Be careful not to output anything using this context at this stage, as it is likely to change by the effect of other generators.
  • generate_output is then called. And guess what is it made for? Oh, generating the output. :) It’s here that you may want to look at the context and call the methods of the writer object that is passed as the first argument of this function. In the PageGenerator example, this method will look at all the pages recorded in the global context and output a file on the disk (using the writer method write_file) for each page encountered.

pelican-themes

Description

pelican-themes is a command line tool for managing themes for Pelican.

Usage
pelican-themes [-h] [-l] [-i theme path [theme path ...]]
[-r theme name [theme name ...]]
[-s theme path [theme path ...]] [-v] [–version]
Optional arguments:
-h, --help Show the help an exit
-l, --list Show the themes already installed
-i theme_path, --install theme_path
 One or more themes to install
-r theme_name, --remove theme_name
 One or more themes to remove
-s theme_path, --symlink theme_path
 Same as “–install”, but create a symbolic link instead of copying the theme. Useful for theme development
-v, --verbose Verbose output
--version Print the version of this script

Examples

Listing the installed themes

With pelican-themes, you can see the available themes by using the -l or --list option:

$ pelican-themes -l
notmyidea
two-column@
simple
$ pelican-themes --list
notmyidea
two-column@
simple

In this example, we can see there are three themes available: notmyidea, simple, and two-column.

two-column is prefixed with an @ because this theme is not copied to the Pelican theme path, but is instead just linked to it (see Creating symbolic links for details about creating symbolic links).

Note that you can combine the --list option with the -v or --verbose option to get more verbose output, like this:

$ pelican-themes -v -l
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pelican-2.6.0-py2.6.egg/pelican/themes/notmyidea
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pelican-2.6.0-py2.6.egg/pelican/themes/two-column (symbolic link to `/home/skami/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/two-column')
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pelican-2.6.0-py2.6.egg/pelican/themes/simple
Installing themes

You can install one or more themes using the -i or --install option. This option takes as argument the path(s) of the theme(s) you want to install, and can be combined with the verbose option:

# pelican-themes --install ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/notmyidea-cms --verbose

# pelican-themes --install ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/notmyidea-cms\
                           ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/martyalchin \
                           --verbose

# pelican-themes -vi ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/two-column
Removing themes

The pelican-themes command can also remove themes from the Pelican themes path. The -r or --remove option takes as argument the name(s) of the theme(s) you want to remove, and can be combined with the --verbose option.

# pelican-themes --remove two-column

# pelican-themes -r martyachin notmyidea-cmd -v
Doing several things at once

The --install, --remove and --symlink option are not mutually exclusive, so you can combine them in the same command line to do more than one operation at time, like this:

# pelican-themes --remove notmyidea-cms two-column \
                 --install ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/notmyidea-cms-fr \
                 --symlink ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/two-column \
                 --verbose

In this example, the theme notmyidea-cms is replaced by the theme notmyidea-cms-fr

See also

Import from other blog software

Description

pelican-import is a command-line tool for converting articles from other software to reStructuredText or Markdown. The supported import formats are:

  • WordPress XML export
  • Dotclear export
  • Posterous API
  • RSS/Atom feed

The conversion from HTML to reStructuredText or Markdown relies on Pandoc. For Dotclear, if the source posts are written with Markdown syntax, they will not be converted (as Pelican also supports Markdown).

Dependencies

pelican-import has some dependencies not required by the rest of Pelican:

  • BeautifulSoup, for WordPress and Dotclear import. Can be installed like any other Python package (pip install BeautifulSoup).
  • Feedparser, for feed import (pip install feedparser).
  • Pandoc, see the Pandoc site for installation instructions on your operating system.

Usage

pelican-import [-h] [--wpfile] [--dotclear] [--posterous] [--feed] [-o OUTPUT]
               [-m MARKUP] [--dir-cat] [--strip-raw] [--disable-slugs]
               [-e EMAIL] [-p PASSWORD]
               input|api_token
Positional arguments
input The input file to read api_token [Posterous only] api_token can be obtained from http://posterous.com/api/
Optional arguments
-h, --help Show this help message and exit
--wpfile WordPress XML export (default: False)
--dotclear Dotclear export (default: False)
--posterous Posterous API (default: False)
--feed Feed to parse (default: False)
-o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
 Output path (default: output)
-m MARKUP, --markup MARKUP
 Output markup format (supports rst & markdown) (default: rst)
--dir-cat Put files in directories with categories name (default: False)
--strip-raw Strip raw HTML code that can’t be converted to markup such as flash embeds or iframes (wordpress import only) (default: False)
--disable-slugs
 Disable storing slugs from imported posts within output. With this disabled, your Pelican URLs may not be consistent with your original posts. (default: False)
-e EMAIL, --email=EMAIL
 Email used to authenticate Posterous API
-p PASSWORD, --password=PASSWORD
 Password used to authenticate Posterous API

Examples

For WordPress:

$ pelican-import --wpfile -o ~/output ~/posts.xml

For Dotclear:

$ pelican-import --dotclear -o ~/output ~/backup.txt

for Posterous:

$ pelican-import --posterous -o ~/output --email=<email_address> --password=<password> <api_token>

Tests

To test the module, one can use sample files:

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Here are some frequently asked questions about Pelican.

What’s the best way to communicate a problem, question, or suggestion?

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 wait long enough (it may take a few hours).

If you’re unable to resolve your issue or if you have a feature request, please refer to the issue tracker.

How can I help?

There are several ways to help out. First, you can report any Pelican suggestions or problems you might have via IRC or the issue tracker. If submitting an issue report, please check the existing issue list first in order to avoid submitting a duplicate issue.

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.

Is it mandatory to have a configuration file?

Configuration files are optional and 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.

I’m creating my own theme. How do I use Pygments for syntax highlighting?

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 .highlight 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.

How do I create my own theme?

Please refer to How to create themes for Pelican.

I want to use Markdown, but I got an error.

Markdown is not a hard dependency for Pelican, so you will need to explicitly install it. You can do so by typing the following command, prepending sudo if permissions require it:

pip install markdown

If you don’t have pip installed, consider installing it via:

easy_install pip

Can I use arbitrary metadata in my templates?

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 metadata can then be accessed in the template:

{% if article.modified %}
Last modified: {{ article.modified }}
{% endif %}

How do I assign custom templates on a per-page basis?

It’s as simple as adding an extra line of metadata to any page or article that you want to have its own template. For example, this is how it would be handled for content in reST format:

:template: template_name

For content in Markdown format:

Template: template_name

Then just make sure your theme contains the relevant template file (e.g. template_name.html).

How can I override the generated URL of a specific page or article?

Include url and save_as metadata in any pages or articles that you want to override the generated URL. Here is an example page in reST format:

Override url/save_as page
#########################

:url: override/url/
:save_as: override/url/index.html

With this metadata, the page will be written to override/url/index.html and Pelican will use url override/url/ to link to this page.

How can I use a static page as my home page?

The override feature mentioned above can be used to specify a static page as your home page. The following Markdown example could be stored in content/pages/home.md:

Title: Welcome to My Site
URL:
save_as: index.html

Thank you for visiting. Welcome!

What if I want to disable feed generation?

To disable feed generation, all feed settings should be set to None. All but three feed settings already default to None, so if you want to disable all feed generation, you only need to specify the following settings:

FEED_ALL_ATOM = None
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM = None
TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM = None

Please note that None and '' are not the same thing. The word None should not be surrounded by quotes.

I’m getting a warning about feeds generated without SITEURL being set properly

RSS and Atom feeds require all URL links to be absolute. In order to properly generate links in Pelican you will need to set SITEURL to the full path of your site.

Feeds are still generated when this warning is displayed, but links within may be malformed and thus the feed may not validate.

My feeds are broken since I upgraded to Pelican 3.x

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 settings:

FEED -> FEED_ATOM
TAG_FEED -> TAG_FEED_ATOM
CATEGORY_FEED -> CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM

Starting in 3.1, the new feed FEED_ALL_ATOM has been introduced: this feed will aggregate all posts regardless of their language. This setting generates 'feeds/all.atom.xml' by default and FEED_ATOM now defaults to None. The following feed setting has also been renamed:

TRANSLATION_FEED -> TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM

Older themes that referenced the old setting names may not link properly. In order to rectify this, please update your theme for compatibility by changing the relevant values in your template files. For an example of complete feed headers and usage please check out the simple theme.

Tips

Here are some tips about Pelican that you might find useful.

Publishing to GitHub

GitHub Pages offer an easy and convenient way to publish Pelican sites. There are two types of GitHub Pages: Project Pages and User Pages. Pelican sites can be published as both Project Pages and User Pages.

Project Pages

To publish a Pelican site as Project Pages you need to push the content of the output dir generated by Pelican to a repository’s gh-pages branch on GitHub.

The excellent ghp-import, which can be installed with easy_install or pip, makes this process really easy.

For example, if the sources of your Pelican site are contained in a GitHub repository, and if you want to publish your Pelican site as Project Pages of this repository, you can then use the following:

$ pelican content -o output pelicanconf.py
$ ghp-import output
$ git push origin gh-pages

The ghp-import output command updates the local gh-pages branch with the content of the output directory (creating the branch if it doesn’t already exist). The git push origin gh-pages command updates the remote gh-pages branch, effectively publishing the Pelican site.

Note

The github target of the Makefile created by the pelican-quickstart command publishes the Pelican site as Project Pages as described above.

User Pages

To publish a Pelican site as User Pages you need to push the content of the output dir generated by Pelican to the master branch of your <username>.github.com repository on GitHub.

Again, you can take advantage of ghp-import:

$ pelican content -o output pelicanconf.py
$ ghp-import output
$ git push git@github.com:elemoine/elemoine.github.com.git gh-pages:master

The git push command pushes the local gh-pages branch (freshly updated by the ghp-import command) to the elemoine.github.com repository’s master branch on GitHub.

Note

To publish your Pelican site as User Pages feel free to adjust the the github target of the Makefile.

Extra Tips

Tip #1:

To automatically update your Pelican site on each commit you can create a post-commit hook. For example, you can add the following to .git/hooks/post-commit:

pelican pelican content -o output pelicanconf.py && ghp-import output && git push origin gh-pages

Tip #2:

To use a custom domain with GitHub Pages you need to have a CNAME file at the root of your pages. For that you will add CNAME file to your content, dir and use the FILES_TO_COPY setting variable to tell Pelican to copy that file to the output dir. For example:

FILES_TO_COPY = (('extra/CNAME', 'CNAME'),)

How to contribute

There are many ways to contribute to Pelican. You can improve the documentation, add missing features, and fix bugs (or just report them). You can also help out by reviewing and commenting on existing issues.

Don’t hesitate to fork Pelican and submit a pull request on GitHub. When doing so, please adhere to the following guidelines.

Contribution submission guidelines

  • Consider whether your new feature might be better suited as a plugin. Folks are usually available in the #pelican IRC channel if help is needed to make that determination.
  • Create a new git branch specific to your change (as opposed to making your commits in the master branch).
  • Don’t put multiple fixes/features in the same branch / pull request. For example, if you’re hacking on a new feature and find a bugfix that doesn’t require your new feature, make a new distinct branch and pull request for the bugfix.
  • Adhere to PEP8 coding standards whenever possible.
  • Check for unnecessary whitespace via git diff --check before committing.
  • Add docs and tests for your changes.
  • Run all the tests on both Python 2.7+ and 3.2+ to ensure nothing was accidentally broken.
  • First line of your commit message should start with present-tense verb, be 50 characters or less, and include the relevant issue number(s) if applicable. Example: Ensure proper PLUGIN_PATH behavior. Refs #428. If the commit completely fixes an existing bug report, please use Fixes #585 or Fix #585 syntax (so the relevant issue is automatically closed upon PR merge).
  • After the first line of the commit message, add a blank line and then a more detailed explanation (when relevant).
  • If you have previously filed a GitHub issue and want to contribute code that addresses that issue, please use hub pull-request instead of using GitHub’s web UI to submit the pull request. This isn’t an absolute requirement, but makes the maintainers’ lives much easier! Specifically: install hub and then run hub pull-request to turn your GitHub issue into a pull request containing your code.

Check out our Git Tips page or ask on the #pelican IRC channel if you need assistance or have any questions about these guidelines.

Setting up the development environment

While there are many ways to set up one’s development environment, following is a method that uses virtualenv. If you don’t have virtualenv installed, you can install it via:

$ pip install virtualenv

Virtual environments allow you to work on Python projects which are isolated from one another so you can use different packages (and package versions) with different projects.

To create and activate a virtual environment, use the following syntax:

$ virtualenv ~/virtualenvs/pelican
$ cd ~/virtualenvs/pelican
$ . bin/activate

To clone the Pelican source:

$ git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican.git src/pelican

To install the development dependencies:

$ cd src/pelican
$ pip install -r dev_requirements.txt

To install Pelican and its dependencies:

$ python setup.py develop

Coding standards

Try to respect what is described in the PEP8 specification when making contributions. This can be eased via the pep8 or flake8 tools, the latter of which in particular will give you some useful hints about ways in which the code/formatting can be improved.

Building the docs

If you make changes to the documentation, you should preview your changes before committing them:

$ pip install sphinx
$ cd src/pelican/docs
$ make html

Open _build/html/index.html in your browser to preview the documentation.

Running the test suite

Each time you add a feature, there are two things to do regarding tests: check that the existing tests pass, and add tests for the new feature or bugfix.

The tests live in pelican/tests and you can run them using the “discover” feature of unittest:

$ python -m unittest discover

After making your changes and running the tests, you may see a test failure mentioning that “some generated files differ from the expected functional tests output.” If you have made changes that affect the HTML output generated by Pelican, and the changes to that output are expected and deemed correct given the nature of your changes, then you should update the output used by the functional tests. To do so, you can use the following two commands:

$ pelican -o pelican/tests/output/custom/ -s samples/pelican.conf.py \
    samples/content/
$ pelican -o pelican/tests/output/basic/ samples/content/
Testing on Python 3.x

Testing on Python 3.x currently requires some extra steps: installing Python 3.x-compatible versions of dependent packages and plugins.

However, you must tell tox to use those Python 3.x-compatible libraries. If you forget this, tox will pull the regular packages from PyPI, and the tests will fail.

Tell tox about the local packages thusly: enter the source directory of smartypants and run tox there. Do this again for the typogrify and webassets packages. SmartyPants and Typogrify do not have real tests, and webassets will fail noisily, but as a result we get these libraries neatly packaged in tox’s distshare directory, which we need in order to run tox for Pelican.

Python 3.x development tips

Here are some tips that may be useful when doing some code for both Python 2.7 and Python 3.x at the same time:

  • Assume every string and literal is unicode (import unicode_literals):
    • Do not use prefix u'.
    • Do not encode/decode strings in the middle of sth. Follow the code to the source (or target) of a string and encode/decode at the first/last possible point.
    • In other words, write your functions to expect and to return unicode.
    • Encode/decode strings if e.g. the source is a Python function that is known to handle this badly, e.g. strftime() in Python 2.
  • Use new syntax: print function, “except ... as e” (not comma) etc.
  • Refactor method calls like dict.iteritems(), xrange() etc. in a way that runs without code change in both Python versions.
  • Do not use magic method __unicode()__ in new classes. Use only __str()__ and decorate the class with @python_2_unicode_compatible.
  • Do not start int literals with a zero. This is a syntax error in Py3k.
  • Unfortunately I did not find an octal notation that is valid in both Pythons. Use decimal instead.
  • use six, e.g.:
    • isinstance(.., basestring) -> isinstance(.., six.string_types)
    • isinstance(.., unicode) -> isinstance(.., six.text_type)
  • setlocale() in Python 2 bails when we give the locale name as unicode, and since we are using from __future__ import unicode_literals, we do that everywhere! As a workaround, I enclosed the localename with str(); in Python 2 this casts the name to a byte string, in Python 3 this should do nothing, because the locale name already had been unicode.
  • Kept range() almost everywhere as-is (2to3 suggests list(range())), just changed it where I felt necessary.
  • Changed xrange() back to range(), so it is valid in both Python versions.

Some history about Pelican

Warning

This page comes from a report the original author (Alexis Métaireau) wrote right after writing Pelican, in December 2010. The information may not be up-to-date.

Pelican is a simple static blog generator. It parses markup files (Markdown or reStructuredText for now) and generates an HTML folder with all the files in it. I’ve chosen to use Python to implement Pelican because it seemed to be simple and to fit to my needs. I did not wanted to define a class for each thing, but still wanted to keep my things loosely coupled. It turns out that it was exactly what I wanted. From time to time, thanks to the feedback of some users, it took me a very few time to provide fixes on it. So far, I’ve re-factored the Pelican code by two times; each time took less than 30 minutes.

Use case

I was previously using WordPress, a solution you can host on a web server to manage your blog. Most of the time, I prefer using markup languages such as Markdown or reStructuredText to type my articles. To do so, I use vim. I think it is important to let the people choose the tool they want to write the articles. In my opinion, a blog manager should just allow you to take any kind of input and transform it to a weblog. That’s what Pelican does. You can write your articles using the tool you want, and the markup language you want, and then generate a static HTML weblog.

_images/overall.png

To be flexible enough, Pelican has template support, so you can easily write your own themes if you want to.

Design process

Pelican came from a need I have. I started by creating a single file application, and I have make it grow to support what it does by now. To start, I wrote a piece of documentation about what I wanted to do. Then, I created the content I wanted to parse (the reStructuredText files) and started experimenting with the code. Pelican was 200 lines long and contained almost ten functions and one class when it was first usable.

I have been facing different problems all over the time and wanted to add features to Pelican while using it. The first change I have done was to add the support of a settings file. It is possible to pass the options to the command line, but can be tedious if there is a lot of them. In the same way, I have added the support of different things over time: Atom feeds, multiple themes, multiple markup support, etc. At some point, it appears that the “only one file” mantra was not good enough for Pelican, so I decided to rework a bit all that, and split this in multiple different files.

I’ve separated the logic in different classes and concepts:

  • writers are responsible of all the writing process of the files. They are responsible of writing .html files, RSS feeds and so on. Since those operations are commonly used, the object is created once, and then passed to the generators.
  • readers are used to read from various formats (Markdown and reStructuredText for now, but the system is extensible). Given a file, they return metadata (author, tags, category, etc) and content (HTML formatted).
  • generators generate the different outputs. For instance, Pelican comes with an ArticlesGenerator and PagesGenerator, into others. Given a configuration, they can do whatever you want them to do. Most of the time it’s generating files from inputs (user inputs and files).

I also deal with contents objects. They can be Articles, Pages, Quotes, or whatever you want. They are defined in the contents.py module and represent some content to be used by the program.

In more detail

Here is an overview of the classes involved in Pelican.

_images/uml.jpg

The interface does not really exist, and I have added it only to clarify the whole picture. I do use duck typing and not interfaces.

Internally, the following process is followed:

  • First of all, the command line is parsed, and some content from the user is used to initialize the different generator objects.
  • A context is created. It contains the settings from the command line and a settings file if provided.
  • The generate_context method of each generator is called, updating the context.
  • The writer is created and given to the generate_output method of each generator.

I make two calls because it is important that when the output is generated by the generators, the context will not change. In other words, the first method generate_context should modify the context, whereas the second generate_output method should not.

Then, it is up to the generators to do what the want, in the generate_context and generate_content method. Taking the ArticlesGenerator class will help to understand some others concepts. Here is what happens when calling the generate_context method:

  • Read the folder “path”, looking for restructured text files, load each of them, and construct a content object (Article) with it. To do so, use Reader objects.
  • Update the context with all those articles.

Then, the generate_content method uses the context and the writer to generate the wanted output.

Release history

3.2 (2013-04-24)

  • Support for Python 3!
  • Override page save-to location from meta-data (enables using a static page as the site’s home page, for example)
  • Time period archives (per-year, per-month, and per-day archives of posts)
  • Posterous blog import
  • Improve WordPress blog import
  • Migrate plugins to separate repository
  • Improve HTML parser
  • Provide ability to show or hide categories from menu using DISPLAY_CATEGORIES_ON_MENU option
  • Auto-regeneration can be told to ignore files via IGNORE_FILES setting
  • Improve post-generation feedback to user
  • For multilingual posts, use meta-data to designate which is the original and which is the translation
  • Add .mdown to list of supported Markdown file extensions
  • Document-relative URL generation (RELATIVE_URLS) is now off by default

3.1 (2012-12-04)

  • Importer now stores slugs within files by default. This can be disabled with the --disable-slugs option.
  • Improve handling of links to intra-site resources
  • Ensure WordPress import adds paragraphs for all types of line endings in post content
  • Decode HTML entities within WordPress post titles on import
  • Improve appearance of LinkedIn icon in default theme
  • Add GitHub and Google+ social icons support in default theme
  • Optimize social icons
  • Add FEED_ALL_ATOM and FEED_ALL_RSS to generate feeds containing all posts regardless of their language
  • Split TRANSLATION_FEED into TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM and TRANSLATION_FEED_RSS
  • Different feeds can now be enabled/disabled individually
  • Allow for blank author: if AUTHOR setting is not set, author won’t default to ${USER} anymore, and a post won’t contain any author information if the post author is empty
  • Move LESS and Webassets support from Pelican core to plugin
  • The DEFAULT_DATE setting now defaults to None, which means that articles won’t be generated unless date metadata is specified
  • Add FILENAME_METADATA setting to support metadata extraction from filename
  • Add gzip_cache plugin to compress common text files into a .gz file within the same directory as the original file, preventing the server (e.g. Nginx) from having to compress files during an HTTP call
  • Add support for AsciiDoc-formatted content
  • Add USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY setting so that feature can be toggled on/off
  • Support arbitrary Jinja template files
  • Restore basic functional tests
  • New signals: generator_init, get_generators, and article_generate_preread

3.0 (2012-08-08)

  • Refactored the way URLs are handled
  • Improved the English documentation
  • Fixed packaging using setuptools entrypoints
  • Added typogrify support
  • Added a way to disable feed generation
  • Added support for DIRECT_TEMPLATES
  • Allow multiple extensions for content files
  • Added LESS support
  • Improved the import script
  • Added functional tests
  • Rsync support in the generated Makefile
  • Improved feed support (easily pluggable with Feedburner for instance)
  • Added support for abbr in reST
  • Fixed a bunch of bugs :-)

2.8 (2012-02-28)

  • Dotclear importer
  • Allow the usage of Markdown extensions
  • Themes are now easily extensible
  • Don’t output pagination information if there is only one page
  • Add a page per author, with all their articles
  • Improved the test suite
  • Made the themes easier to extend
  • Removed Skribit support
  • Added a pelican-quickstart script
  • Fixed timezone-related issues
  • Added some scripts for Windows support
  • Date can be specified in seconds
  • Never fail when generating posts (skip and continue)
  • Allow the use of future dates
  • Support having different timezones per language
  • Enhanced the documentation

2.7 (2011-06-11)

  • Use logging rather than echoing to stdout
  • Support custom Jinja filters
  • Compatibility with Python 2.5
  • Added a theme manager
  • Packaged for Debian
  • Added draft support

2.6 (2011-03-08)

  • Changes in the output directory structure
  • Makes templates easier to work with / create
  • Added RSS support (was Atom-only)
  • Added tag support for the feeds
  • Enhance the documentation
  • Added another theme (brownstone)
  • Added translations
  • Added a way to use cleaner URLs with a rewrite url module (or equivalent)
  • Added a tag cloud
  • Added an autoreloading feature: the blog is automatically regenerated each time a modification is detected
  • Translate the documentation into French
  • Import a blog from an RSS feed
  • Pagination support
  • Added Skribit support

2.5 (2010-11-20)

  • Import from Wordpress
  • Added some new themes (martyalchin / wide-notmyidea)
  • First bug report!
  • Linkedin support
  • Added a FAQ
  • Google Analytics support
  • Twitter support
  • Use relative URLs, not static ones

2.4 (2010-11-06)

  • Minor themes changes
  • Add Disqus support (so we have comments)
  • Another code refactoring
  • Added config settings about pages
  • Blog entries can also be generated in PDF

2.3 (2010-10-31)

  • Markdown support

2.2 (2010-10-30)

  • Prettify output
  • Manages static pages as well

2.1 (2010-10-30)

  • Make notmyidea the default theme

2.0 (2010-10-30)

  • Refactoring to be more extensible
  • Change into the setting variables

1.2 (2010-09-28)

  • Added a debug option
  • Added per-category feeds
  • Use filesystem to get dates if no metadata is provided
  • Add Pygments support

1.1 (2010-08-19)

  • First working version