Hexo Theme Phase

Phase is a Hexo blog theme that wraps static content in a cinematic 'flow of time' presentation, highlighted by its Phase Beam live background and built-in Fancybox lightbox.

What is Phase?

Phase is a theme for the Hexo static site generator, designed to give blogs a distinctive visual identity centered on time and motion. It takes your existing Hexo site with markdown posts and renders it as a responsive, media-rich blog. The theme is hosted in the hexojs GitHub organization, indicating it is part of the official Hexo theme ecosystem. It runs entirely on Hexo's template and asset pipeline, so no additional frameworks or external CSS frameworks are required.

Key Features

• Phase Beam live background — An animated background effect that gives the site a living, flowing atmosphere; a YouTube demo (linked from the README) shows it in action.
• Photo alt captions — Reads the alt attribute of images and automatically outputs that text as a caption beneath the photo, making posts more informative and accessible.
• Integrated Fancybox — Fancybox is bundled in the theme, so image galleries and individual photos open in an overlay lightbox with zoom and navigation, without installing a separate plugin.
• Responsive media resizing — HTML5 videos and embedded content such as iframes and object embeds are resized automatically to match the page width, keeping media fully responsive.
• Standard Hexo workflow — Install by cloning the repository into themes/phase and toggling the theme setting in _config.yml; updates are pulled with git pull.

Who is Phase for?

Phase is aimed at Hexo users who want a media-focused blog theme with minimal setup. The combination of automatic captions, lightbox galleries, and responsive embeds makes it especially useful for image-heavy posts.

• Hexo bloggers who want a visually distinctive theme that doesn't compromise on readability — Phase handles the presentation while they write in Markdown.
• Photographers and visual artists using Hexo: the automatic alt-text captions and built-in Fancybox make it easy to present image-driven posts and galleries.
• Developers comfortable with the command line who want a theme they can install quickly with git and update the same way.

What can you do with Phase?

Phase's feature set directly supports three common blogging tasks: adding a live background, presenting photo galleries, and embedding video in posts.

• Add a live background: Enable the Phase Beam effect to give your blog a subtle animated backdrop that emphasizes time and motion.
• Showcase photo galleries: Upload multiple images with descriptive alt text and let visitors open them in the Fancybox lightbox without leaving the page.
• Embed video seamlessly: Paste YouTube videos or HTML5 video tags into posts and the theme will scale them to fit the content column automatically.

How do I install Phase?

To install, clone the theme into your Hexo site's themes directory:

git clone --depth 1 http://github.com/hexojs/hexo-theme-phase themes/phase

Then edit _config.yml and change the theme field from the current value to phase:

_config.yml
- theme: some-theme
+ theme: phase

To update, enter the theme directory and pull the latest changes:

cd themes/phase
git pull