Lysande Jekyll Theme

Lysande is a Jekyll theme meant as a base for a portfolio site.

• Clean responsive design that works all the way down to a mobile screen
• Blog page and layout
• Projects page and layout
• Disqus Comments
• SEO best practices via Jekyll SEO Tag

A live preview of the theme here

The theme being used as the theme for my portfolio here

Table of Contents

1. Installation
   1. Ruby Gem Method
   2. GitHub Pages Method
      1. Remove the Unnecessary
2. Upgrading
   1. Ruby Gem
   2. Remote Theme
   3. Use Git
      1. Pull Down Updates
   4. Update Files Manually
3. Structure
   1. Starting Fresh
   2. Starting from jekyll new
4. Configuration
   1. Text
   2. Navigation
   3. Author
   4. Comments (via Disqus)
5. Layouts
   1. layout: default
   2. layout: blog
   3. layout: post
   4. layout: projects
6. Customization
   1. Overriding Includes and Layouts
   2. Customizing Sass (SCSS)
   3. Icons
7. Contributing
8. Credits
9. License

Installation

If you're running Jekyll v3.5+ and self-hosting you can quickly install the theme as a Ruby gem. If you're hosting with GitHub Pages you can install as a remote theme or directly copy all of the theme files (see structure below) into your project.

Ruby Gem Method

1. Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

   gem "lysande-jekyll-theme"

2. Add this line to your Jekyll site's _config.yml file:

   theme: lysande-jekyll-theme

3. Then run Bundler to install the theme gem and dependencies:

   bundle install
   

GitHub Pages Method

GitHub Pages has added full support for any GitHub-hosted theme.

1. Replace gem "lysande-jekyll-theme" in your Gemfile with:

   gem "github-pages", group: :jekyll_plugins

2. Run bundle update and verify that all gems install properly.

3. Add remote_theme: "theuggla/lysande-jekyll-theme" to your _config.yml file. Remove any other theme: or remote_theme: entries.

---

Note: Your Jekyll site should be viewable immediately at http://USERNAME.github.io. If it's not, you can force a rebuild by Customizing Your Site (see below for more details).

If you're hosting several Jekyll based sites under the same GitHub username you will have to use Project Pages instead of User Pages. Essentially you rename the repo to something other than USERNAME.github.io and create a gh-pages branch off of master. For more details on how to set things up check GitHub's documentation.

Remove the Unnecessary

If you forked or downloaded the lysande-jekyll-theme repo you can safely remove the following files and folders:

• lysande-jekyll-theme.gemspec
• LICENSE
• README.md
• screenshot.png
• /example
• Gemfile.lock

Upgrading

If you're using the Ruby Gem or remote theme versions of Lysande, upgrading is fairly painless.

To check which version you are currently using, view the source of your built site and you should something similar to:

<!--
    Lysande Jekyll Theme 1.0.0
    Copyright 2017-2018 Molly Arhammar - theuggla.github.io
    Free for personal and commercial use under the MIT license
    https://github.com/theuggla/lysande-jekyll-theme/blob/master/LICENSE
-->

At the top of every .html file and /assets/main.css.

Ruby Gem

Simply run bundle update if you're using Bundler (have a Gemfile) or gem update lysande-jekyll-theme if you're not.

Remote Theme

When hosting with GitHub Pages you'll need to push up a commit to force a rebuild with the latest theme release.

An empty commit will get the job done too if you don't have anything to push at the moment:

git commit --allow-empty -m "Force rebuild of site"

Use Git

If you want to get the most out of the Jekyll + GitHub Pages workflow, then you'll need to utilize Git. To pull down theme updates you must first ensure there's an upstream remote. If you forked the theme's repo then you're likely good to go.

To double check, run git remote -v and verify that you can fetch from origin https://github.com/theuggla/lysande-jekyll-theme.git.

To add it you can do the following:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/theuggla/lysande-jekyll-theme.git

Pull Down Updates

Now you can pull any commits made to theme's master branch with:

git pull upstream master

Depending on the amount of customizations you've made after forking, there's likely to be merge conflicts. Work through any conflicting files Git flags, staging the changes you wish to keep, and then commit them.

Update Files Manually

Another way of dealing with updates is downloading the theme --- replacing your layouts, includes, and assets with the newer ones manually. To be sure that you don't miss any changes it's probably a good idea to review the theme's commit history to see what's changed since.

Here's a quick checklist of the important folders/files you'll want to be mindful of:

Name
_layouts	Replace all. Apply edits if you customized any layouts.
_includes	Replace all. Apply edits if you customized any includes.
assets	Replace all. Apply edits if you customized stylesheets, scripts or icons.
_sass	Replace all. Apply edits if you customized Sass partials.
_data/theme.yml	Safe to keep. Verify that there were no major structural changes or additions.
_config.yml	Safe to keep. Verify that there were no major structural changes or additions.

---

Note: If you're not seeing the latest version, be sure to flush browser and CDN caches. Depending on your hosting environment older versions of /assets/css/main.css *.md or *.html may be cached.

Structure

Layouts, includes, Sass partials, and data files are all placed in their default locations. Stylesheets and icons in assets, and a few development related files in the project's root directory.

Please note: If you installed Basically Basic via the Ruby Gem method, theme files found in /_layouts, /_includes, /_sass, and /assets will be missing. This is normal as they are bundled with the lysande-jekyll-theme gem.

lysande-jekyll-theme
├── _data                      # data files
|  └── theme.yml               # theme settings and custom text
├── _includes                  # theme includes
├── _layouts                   # theme layouts (see below for details)
├── _sass                      # Sass partials
├── assets
|  ├── backgrounds
|  |  └── default_rustic.jpg
|  ├── fonts
|  |  └── [...fonts]
|  ├── icons
|  |  └── [...social media icons]
|  ├── open-graph
|  |  └── default.png
|  ├── projects
|  |  └── images
|  |  └── symbols
|  └── main.scss
├── _config.yml               # sample configuration
└── index.md                  # sample home page
└── blog.md                   # sample blog landing page
└── projects.md               # sample projects landing page

Starting Fresh

After creating a Gemfile and installing the theme you'll need to add and edit the following files:

• _config.yml
• /_data/theme.yml
• index.md
• blog.md
• projects.md

Starting from jekyll new

Using the jekyll new command will get you up and running the quickest.

Edit _config.yml and create _data/theme.yml as instructed above and you're good to go.

Configuration

Configuration of site-wide elements (title, description, author, etc.) happens in your project's _config.yml. See the example configuration in this repo for additional reference. The most important thing to note is that you will want to add permalink: pretty to your _config.yml to keep the links working properly.

	Description
title	Your site's title (e.g., Arthur Dent's Site)
email	Your emai. Will be used as a link in the social media menu
description	Short site description (e.g., A site about my coffe projects)
url	The base URL to your site (e.g., https://groverloaf.org). Leave empty if hosting on github pages.
author	Your name, used as a byline and title of the site
share_image	For sharing in line with Open Graph, set the name for your image (including .png) and place it in your /assets/open-graph directory.
background_image	The name of the image-file to use as a background image of the site. Place the image in /assets/backgrounds
rss	If set to true, an rss feed will be added for the projects of the site
[social-media]_username	The theme supports usernames to various social media sites. If you add in any of these usernames in your config file, an icon will appear in your header that links to that account. Supported social media sites are twitter, github, tumblr, instagram, facebook, pinterest
youtube_channel	The name of your Youtube channel. If added, an icon will appear in your header that links to the channel
skype_inviteURL	The url to invite someone to add you on skype. If added, an icon will appear in your header that links to the invitation
linkedin_usernameURL	The username-URL you have chosen for your LinkedIn account. If added, an icon will appear in your header that links to the account
upwork_userID	The ID of your Upwork account. If added, an icon will appear in your header that links to the account
disqus_shortname	To enable Disqus comments, add your Disqus shortname

For more configuration options be sure to consult the documentation for: jekyll-seo-tag, [jekyll-feed][jekyll-feed],

Text

To change text on the landing pages of the blog, project and index pages found in the example folder, add the following to your /_data/theme.yml file and customize as necessary. Leaving the field empty ill revert to the default-text, while setting it to none will show no text at all.

t:
  index_text: \'\'|\'none\'|\'custom text\'
  blog_intro: \'\'|\'none\'|\'custom text\'
  projects_intro: \'\'|\'none\'|\'custom text\'

Navigation

All pages with a menu: main attribute in their Front Matter will be added to the global menu. For more granular control and sorting of these menu links:

1. The link in the menu will be named after the page's title attribute in the Front Matter.

2. The links will be sorted according to the weight attribute in the front matter, starting from 1 and counting upwards.

Author

Author information from the _config.yml is used as the byline of your page.

Comments (via Disqus)

Optionally, if you have a Disqus account, you can show a comments section below each post.

To enable Disqus comments, add your Disqus shortname to your project's _config.yml file:

  disqus_shortname: my_disqus_shortname

Comments will only appear in production when built with the following environment value: JEKYLL_ENV=production. If you are building with Github Pages, the environment variable will be set to production automatically.

If you don't want to display comments for a particular post you can disable them by adding comments: false to that post's front matter.

To display the comments, make sure your posts has a layout of 'post' and add comments to the Front Matter of the posts you would like the comments on, like so:

comments: true

Layouts

This theme provides the following layouts, which you can use by setting the layout Front Matter on each page, like so:

---
layout: name
---

The theme comes with four layouts: default, post, projects and blog. It includes a header, footer and a global navigation menu.

It is intended to be used with a _projects folder, where markdown documents representing your projects can be stored. Without the _projects folder, it is possible to use it as a blog with _posts only.

layout: default

This layout handles all of the basic page scaffolding placing the page content between the masthead and footer elements. All other layouts inherit this one and provide additional styling and features inside of the {{ content }} block.

layout: blog

The blog layout includes a local navigation list of all posts in _posts, and displays a list with the title, an excerpt, and a disqus comment count for each post.

layout: post

To be able to use the theme with the blog and post layouts, create a _posts directory and place your blog posts in it with a Front Matter that includes

layout: post

The blog posts should be in .md format, and be named in line with the YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-post.md-convention. See example

The post layout supports the following additional Front Matter:

url: /your-custom-url-to-post
title: the title of the post
comments: true
excerpt_separator: <!--custom--> 

If excerpt_separator is not given, it will default to the first paragraph break. If comments is set to true and a disqus_shortname has been given in the _config-yml, disqus comments will be enabled when the site is in production.

layout: projects

To be able to use the theme with the projects layout, copy this into your _config.yml-file:

collections:
  projects:
    categories: [example1, example2]

Add the categories you are interested in, separated by commas, between the square brackets.

To make use of the projects layout, create a _projects directory and add your projects as .md-files, adding the following to each project's Front Matter:

category: example1

and supply one of the categories you have recorded in your config file. See example

The projects will be displayed on any page you give the projects layout, or otherwise accessible via site.projects, just as site.posts gives you access to your blog posts. Anything you add to a page with the projects layout will be displayed on top of the projects posts, under the projects navigational menu. Projects are displayed crouped by category, and the projects layout adds a navigation between the different categories if more categories than three and/or a small screen display.

The projects layout supports the following front matter:

title: "jekyll theme"
category: code, published
tags: liquid, html, sass

Whete title will be the title of the project, and tags will be displayed in smaller font.

Customization

The default structure and style of this theme can be overridden and customized in the following two ways.

Overriding Includes and Layouts

Theme defaults can be overridden by placing a file with the same name into your project's _includes or _layouts directory. For instance:

• To specify a custom style path or meta data to the _includes/head.html file, create an _includes directory in your project, copy _includes/head.html from Lysande's gem folder to <your_project>/_includes and start editing that file.

ProTip: to locate the theme's files on your computer run bundle show lysande-jekyll-theme. This returns the location of the gem-based theme files.

Customizing Sass (SCSS)

To override the default Sass (located in theme's _sass directory), do one of the following:

1. Copy directly from the Lysande gem

   • Go to your local Lysande gem installation directory (run bundle show lysande-jekyll-theme to get the path to it).
   • Copy the contents of /assets/main.scss from there to <your_project>.
   • Customize what you want inside <your_project>/assets/main.scss.

2. Copy from this repo.

   • Copy the contents of assets/main.scss to <your_project>.
   • Customize what you want inside <your_project/assets/main.scss.

The sass layouts available to import to your main.scss should you wish are the _base, that styles the main appearance of the site, the header and the footer. It is recommended that you also import the _menu for styling of the global navigation. If you opt to use the project and blog layout for displaying your projects and blog posts, the styles for them are included as _projects and _blog. The _responsive makes the site responsive.

Full list of _sass as follows:

1. @include '_base.scss' --- basic styling
2. @include '_menu.scss' --- global menu
3. @include '_projects.scss' --- page that displays projects
4. @include '_blog.scss' --- main blog page with links to blog posts
5. @include '_responsive.scss' --- makes site responsive

Icons

There are icon helper includes to aid in generating social network links.

Include Parameter	Description	Required
username	Username on given social network	Required

Contributing

Found a typo in the documentation? Interested in adding a feature or fixing a bug? Then by all means submit an issue or take a stab at submitting a pull request. If this is your first pull request, it may be helpful to read up on the GitHub Flow.

Pull Requests

When submitting a pull request:

1. Clone the repo.
2. Create a branch off of master and give it a meaningful name (e.g. my-awesome-new-feature) and describe the feature or fix.
3. Open a pull request on GitHub.

Sample pages can be found in the /example folder if you'd like to tackle any "low-hanging fruit" like fixing typos, bad grammar, etc.

---

Credits

Creator

Molly Arhammar

• https://theuggla.github.io
• https://github.com/theuggla
• https://linkedin.com/in/molly-arhammar

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016-2019 Molly Arhammar and contributors

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.