Fresh is a responsive Pelican theme built with HTML5 and a layout adapted from Smashing HTML5 and Twitter Bootstrap, giving static-site bloggers a clean two-column blog design. It accepts Pelican's content and settings as input and outputs a complete static blog with a navigation bar, sidebar, article pages, and optional search, comments, analytics, and social sharing.
What is Fresh?
Fresh is a responsive Pelican theme created by Jui-Shan Liang and released under the GPL v2 license. It runs on Pelican, the Python static site generator, and renders blog posts and pages into an HTML5 layout styled with Bootstrap. The theme supports Pelican's built-in global variables and adds a few theme-specific settings, and a live demo is available at jsliang.com/pelican-fresh-demo/blog.
Key Features
- Google Analytics — Set the GOOGLE_ANALYTICS variable to add analytics tracking to every page.
- DISQUS comments — Configure DISQUS_SITENAME to enable DISQUS comment threads on articles.
- Custom link lists — Define LINKS as a tuple of name and URL pairs to display a blogroll in the sidebar.
- Social widgets — Supply a SOCIAL tuple of name and URL pairs to show social profile links.
- GitHub ribbon — Set GITHUB_URL to display a "Fork me on GitHub" ribbon, useful for open-source project blogs.
- Google Custom Search Engine — Assign a search engine unique ID to GOOGLE_CUSTOM_SEARCH to place a Google search bar in the navigation.
- Hide categories from menu — Set HIDE_CATEGORIES_FROM_MENU to True to remove the categories menu item.
- ShareThis buttons — Add a ShareThis Pub Key via SHARETHIS_PUB_KEY to display two rows of social share buttons above and below each article.
- Syntax highlighting — Code blocks are highlighted by default.
Who is it for?
Pelican bloggers who want a responsive, Bootstrap-based theme with minimal JavaScript dependencies. It's also suited to developers who publish project documentation or technical blogs and want built-in Google Analytics, Disqus, and custom search. The theme presumes familiarity with Pelican's settings file, since all customization happens through Pelican global variables.
What can you do with Fresh?
- Technical bloggers — Add a Google Custom Search bar and code syntax highlighting to make posts more navigable and readable.
- Open-source maintainers — Display a GitHub ribbon and a list of project links in the sidebar to direct visitors to repositories.
- Personal bloggers — Use social widgets and ShareThis buttons to encourage readers to share posts across social networks.
Notes on setup
The theme's documentation warns that the RELATIVE_URLS global variable should not be set to True (the default is False) so that Facebook meta tags and canonical links are generated correctly.
