Question: Creating a theme that requires a custom plugins / files / configuration

[vbharadwaj-bk]

I recently wrote a port of the template al-folio for Pelican. The original is a popular academic website template written for Jekyll with Liquid templates (MIT license). The Pelican version is here:https://github.com/vbharadwaj-bk/al-folio-python, and you can see a live version on my website. It might be useful to make this a Pelican theme, since I am sure there are others who would like to use this template with Python instead of Ruby.

My question: this template requires some special pages and content files (e.g. config.yml for a site-wide configuration, homepage has some specific metadata about the profile picture, etc.). Some custom options need to be set in pelicanconf.py, and my repo bundles a Pelican plugin that handles some logic on the Python side.

The themes in the Pelican-themes repository currently only seem to have static files and a list of templates, without any "starter code" about what the content directory or settings file should look like. Does this imply that having plugins / additional settings / special pages falls outside the scope of a theme? Or is there some way to include all this "sample content" in the theme directory?

[avaris]

Does this imply that having plugins / additional settings / special pages falls outside the scope of a theme?

Currently... Yes: Themes have no way to "enforce" these conditions, they are merely a bundle of template and static content. And no: themes may have dependencies/requirements/etc but this is communicated via README (at best).

We want to move toward themes as python packages. This should simplify a lot of this. See #1564 for discussion and possible plans for implementation. I am looking for input from theme developers for what the interface and functionality should look like. Feel free to chime in :).

[vbharadwaj-bk]

Themes as Python packages seems like a good solution! I will follow the discussion.