Plaintro

Plaintro is a responsive Jekyll theme aimed at personal websites.

Live Demo

Table of Contents

• Features
• Installation
  • Gem-based theme
  • Github Pages
• Usage
  • Configuration
  • Top Header Bar
  • Default Page
  • Blog
  • Post
  • Archive
  • Portfolio
  • Resume
  • Google Analytics
• Contributing
• Development
• License

Features

• Normalize.css
• Font Awesome
• Google Analytics
• Jekyll Feed
• Jekyll Paginate
• Jekyll SEO Tag
• Responsive web design
• Multiple layouts for different pages (see Usage for more details)
• Easy-to-use templates for adding a new project to the portfolio page

Installation

There are two ways to use plaintro: Gem-based theme and Github Pages.

Gem-based theme

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

   gem "plaintro"

2. And add this line to your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

   theme: plaintro

3. And then execute:

   $ bundle
   

4. Or install it yourself as:

   $ gem install plaintro
   

Github Pages

Github Pages uses the --safe flag to build jekyll websites, which disable custom plugins, caching to disk, and ignore symbolic links. Because of that constraint, you can either fork/clone the repo and customize the theme, or use jekyll-remote-theme instead.

To build Github Pages via jekyll-remote-theme, follow the steps below:

1. Add these lines to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

   gem "github-pages", group: :jekyll_plugins
   gem "jekyll-remote-theme"

2. And add these lines to your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

   plugins:
       - jekyll-remote-theme
   
   remote-theme: xh5a5n6k6/plaintro

Usage

Configuration

All site configurations are set in the _config.yml. The simplest way to use it is to copy the _config.yml to your Jekyll site, and then customize it.

Top Header Bar

There are two main information sections shown in the header bar: navigation and social links.

• Navigation

  Top navigation are built from the menu list in the _config.yml. You can easily arrange the order and modify the contents.

  menu:
    - {name: 'Home', url: '/'}
    - {name: 'Blog', url: '/blog/'}
    - {name: 'Portfolio', url: '/portfolio/'}
    - {name: 'Resume', url: '/resume.html'}

  Note: if you enable the blog page, be sure its url matches the paginate_path set in the _config.yml. (See Blog for more details)

• Social Links

  Social networks are built from the social list in the _config.yml. You can easily modify the contents and change icons, which can be found on Font Awesome.

  social:
    - {icon: 'github-square', link: 'URL/TO/YOUR/GITHUB/ACCOUNT'}
    - {icon: 'vimeo-square', link: 'URL/TO/YOUR/VIMEO/ACCOUNT'}
    - {icon: 'twitter-square', link: 'URL/TO/YOUR/TWITTER/ACCOUNT'}
    - {icon: 'linkedin', link: 'URL/TO/YOUR/LINKEDIN/ACCOUNT'}

Default Page

Default is the most common layout used in plaintro. Every layout is based on it.

To use this layout, add these data in your file:

---
layout: default
title: YOUR PAGE TITLE
---

And then write contents with Markdown.

Blog

When using jekyll-paginate, if you specify the paginate_path in the _config.yml, it will read in /PATH/TO/YOUR/BLOG/index.html and write the output to /PATH/TO/YOUR/BLOG/page:num/. Please refer to the Jekyll docs for pagination.

To use the blog layout, create a file named with index.html and add these data inside:

---
layout: blog
title: Blog
---

Post

Before using this layout, be sure the conventions in Jekyll when writing a post:

• Put it in the ./_posts folder
• Name it with the date first like 2021-08-05-My-blog-post.md

You can refer to the Jekyll docs for writing posts.

Now to use the post layout, add these data in your post:

---
layout: post
title: YOUR POST TITLE
author: POST AUTHOR
tags: [TAG-A, TAG-B, TAG-C]
---

And then write down your post contents.

Archive

Plaintro provides the archive page implemented in pure Liquid. It now only supports yead-based archive.

To use this, simply create a file and add these data in it:

---
layout: blog-archive
title: Archive
---

Portfolio

Porfolio is a feature page with portfolio layout, it contains all include template contents user provided.

To use it in your file like porfolio.html, first add these data inside:

---
layout: portfolio
title: Portfolio
---

Next, add contents to your portfolio page, plaintro provides two include templates to help you achieve it:

• Template for each category, you just need to edit the title blank with the category name. For example, replace "CATEGORY NAME" with "Projects".

  {% include /portfolio-category.html title="CATEGORY NAME" %}

• Template for each section (project), there are three blanks you need to edit:

  • description: path to the short description of your section shown in the portfolio page.
    For example, /portfolio/section-a.md. It should be noted that this path MUST be under the ./_includes/ folder, i.e., the actual path of the above example is ./_includes/portfolio/section-a.md, but you can skip the leading ./includes as the desciption path.
  • image: path to the cover image of your section.
    For example, /assets/images/section-a.jpg.
  • url: path to your section page.
    For example, /portfolio/section-a.html.
    
    

  {% include /portfolio-section.html
      description="/PATH/TO/SECTION/DESCRIPTION"
      image="/PATH/TO/SECTION/IMAGE"
      url="/PATH/TO/SECTION/PAGE"
  %}

To correctly use these templates, you can take ./portfolio/index.html as a reference.

Resume

To use resume layout in your file, simply add these data inside:

---
layout: resume
title: Resume
---

Then you can take resume.md as a reference and write down the contents.

Google Analytics

To track your website through Google Analytics, simply set the Track ID in your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

google_analytics_id: UA-XXXXXXX-X

Or if you are using Google Analytics 4, replace the Track ID with the Measurement ID in your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

google_analytics_id: G-XXXXXXXX

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/xh5a5n6k6/plaintro. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

Development

To set up your environment to develop this theme, run bundle install.

Your theme is setup just like a normal Jekyll site! To test your theme, run bundle exec jekyll serve and open your browser at http://localhost:4000. This starts a Jekyll server using your theme. Add pages, documents, data, etc. like normal to test your theme's contents. As you make modifications to your theme and to your content, your site will regenerate and you should see the changes in the browser after a refresh, just like normal.

When your theme is released, only the files in _layouts, _includes, _sass and assets tracked with Git will be bundled. To add a custom directory to your theme-gem, please edit the regexp in plaintro.gemspec accordingly.

License

The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.