SemLican

A partial port of Matthias Pfefferle's SemPress WordPress theme to the Pelican static site generator. (Naming things is hard...)

Support note

I did this for my blog https://projectgus.com, so the features it supports are generally the ones I am using. I'm interested in fixing bugs in the features that I use, and I'm happy to accept PRs for new features if they've been tested to work well. However in general SemLican is unsupported and is probably not suitable for some use cases.

License

Limitations

Compared to SemPress:

The SemPress sidebar by default contains a search field and is otherwise fully configurable using WordPress Widgets. The SemLican sidebar is currently hard-coded to show five Recent Posts, and yearly archive links if YEARLY_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS is enabled. It's possible to fork the theme and edit templates/sidebar.html to have whatever you want, of course.
English translation only at this time
Probably less Semantic microformats and microdata is included (PRs welcome to re-add the ones that I missed).
The archives.html and categories.html list pages don't really have equivalents in WordPress. SemLican has some basic pages for these, but they're not well done.
On filtered pages - i.e. "Period archive" pages (yearly, monthly, daily posts), Tag pages, and Category pages - there is no Archive section in the sidebar. This seems like a Pelican theme limitation, the dates object is already filtered to only include the articles that are shown on the page so there's nothing to generate the Archive from.
No Category or Tag RSS/Atom feed URLs

Compared to most Pelican themes:

The authors.html list page is not implemented.
The tags.html list page is not implemented (individual tag URLs are implemented).
If configured, "Period archives" pages (yearly, monthly, daily posts) show post summaries (like Wordpress) instead of a list of post titles (like Pelican)

Required Plugins

Run python -m pip install -r requirements.txt to get all of these in one go.

Configuration

Some of these settings are only necessary if migrating from Wordpress and trying not to break any inbound URLs.

In pelicanconf.py:

Set DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT if you want dates to match WordPress ones. I use DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT = '%B %d, %Y'

Set URLs to match Wordpress URLs, i.e.

ARTICLE_URL = '{date:%Y}/{date:%m}/{slug}/'
ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = '{date:%Y}/{date:%m}/{slug}/index.html'
PAGE_URL = 'pages/{slug}/'
PAGE_SAVE_AS = 'pages/{slug}/index.html'

YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = '{date:%Y}/index.html'
MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = '{date:%Y}/{date:%m}/index.html'

FEED_ALL_RSS = `feed.rss`
FEED_ALL_ATOM = `/feed/atom.xml`  # TODO check these

YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS has to be set as shown above for the Archives in the sidebar to work
SEMLICAN_ISSO_DATA_URL and SEMLICAN_ISSO_SRC_URL - If both are set then articles will include a comments section for the self-hosted comments software Isso. SEMLICAN_ISSO_DATA_URL is the value for data-isso= and SEMLICAN_ISSO_SRC_URL is the value for src=, both in the isso script tag. CSS classes for Isso are provided already in the theme, and have been tweaked a little to look similar to SemPress (not the same).
SEMLICAN_HIDE_CATEGORIES - if set to True, disable any "Posted in category" headers and footers on articles. Category pages are still generated but they're not linked from articles.
SEMLICAN_HIDE_AUTHOR - if set to True, disable any byline of "by author" on articles. Author pages are still generated but they're not linked from articles.
SEMLICAN_HIDE_RSS_LINKS - Optional, but if set to True then pages won't have links to the RSS feeds in them. Can be useful if you want to keep old RSS URLs valid but encourage new readers to subscribe via Atom instead.

On server:

Ensure that the web server will search .html, .rss and .xml extensions as well as index.html, i.e
- /tag/name/ should serve /tag/name.html if it exists
- /tag/othername/ should serve /tag/othername/index.html if it exists
- /feed/ should serve /feed.rss if it exists (assuming FEED_ALL_RSS set as shown above)