Varia website

https://varia.zone

Pelican

The Varia website is made with Pelican, a static site generator written in Python. This means that the website is first generated on a computer (using Python, Jinja and Pelican) into a set of html pages, files and images. This set of documents is then uploaded to the server.

One of the things that Pelican uses is plugins. They are used to add extra features to the generation process of the website.

In this repository there is a folder called 'plugins' and another one called 'plugins-custom'.

The first one, 'plugins', is linked to the offical collection of plugins from the Pelican project 'pelican-plugins'.

The other one, 'plugins-custom', consists of plugins that we wrote ourself.

Clone

To clone both the varia.website and pelican-plugins repository, add the --recurse-submodules option in your git clone command:

$ git clone https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/varia.website.git --recurse-submodules

Install

$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Start

$ pelican --autoreload

Visit the website at localhost:8000

Update submodules

We are currently using two submodules:

• pelican-plugins (https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-plugins)
• plugins-custom (https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/plugins-custom)

To update these submodules within your (already) cloned repository, first init the submodule, and then update it:

cd /path/to/submodule

git submodule init

git submodule update

Posting Content

We're using Pelican to generate a static website. The main way to add content to the website is by making 'posts' in the folder content. This can be done either locally or via the gitlab interface by creating a new file. Make sure that each article contains at least the following at the top of the document:

Title: een nieuw initiatief
Date: 2017-07-07 18:32
Category: news
Tags: event, workshop
slug: the-name-of-the-html-page
lang: nl OR en
event_start: 2017-07-07 18:32
event_duration:4h
featured_image: /images/image.png

Articles are written in a markup language called markdown.

Here is an overview of the syntax. You can also use the online editor in this Gitea interface to help you.