Backdrop Pelican Theme

Backdrop is a responsive theme which adjusts itself to different screen and window sizes, built on Zurb Foundation. It is designed to look modern, but at the same time traditional, using a serif font and darker colours. It features full Disqus integration and can be customized through variables in your Pelican configuration file. See it live at my blog, The Political Physicist.

This is an example of the page footer on a medium screen.

I you want to customize Backdrop, perhaps consider using Sass and Grunt, as I did when originally designing it. See the backdrop-theme repository.

Compatible Plugins

The theme has been designed to use the representative_image plugin. However, websites will look fine without it. It is also known to work with the render_math and sitemap plugins, but these work with all themes and Backdrop is in no way special in this regard. In future, support may be added for the pelican-githubprojects and tipue_search plugins.

Theme Variables

The following variables can be set in your pelicanconf.py file in order to customize your website.

• SITESUBTITLE, appears below the SITENAME at the top of the page
• PROFILE_IMAGE, the path to a picture of you or your organization to display in the sidebar next to any description
• FAVICON, the path to a PNG or ICO image to be used as a favicon
• BACKDROP_IMAGE, the path to the picture to be displayed in the sidebar/bottom-bar
• SITE_DESCRIPTION, a few words about you or your website, to be displayed in the sidebar next to the profile image
• LINKS, a list of tuples (title, URL) for external sites which will appear on the sidebar. Can be used as a blogroll
• DISQUS_URL, the short Disqus sitename, allowing Disqus comments to be displayed on your website
• SOCIAL, a list of tuples (title, URL) to appear below the PROFILE_IMAGE and SITE_DESCRIPTION, linking to social media. The title should be whatever you want the text to be in the link, but in order to have an icon it must correspond to the name of a Font Awesome icon when converted to lowercase.
• EMAIL, displayed alongside SOCIAL
• YEAR, the year to appear in the copyright notice. (Hint: from datetime import date, YEAR = date.today().year)
• TAG_CLOUD_MAX_ITEMS, the number of tags to display in the footer of the website
• LICENSE, the license under which to release the websites contents (ex: Creative Commons). Write it in HTML in order to use an image and/or link.
• BLOGKEYWORDS, a list or tuple of strings containg keywords to be placed in the metadata of your website, allowing Google to better categorize it

The paths for FAVICON, PROFILE_IMAGE, and BACKDROP_IMAGE can all use the same {filename}/|filename| syntax as done when linking between articles.

If your website is paginated, make sure to include the following: PAGINATED_DIRECT_TEMPLATES = ('categories', 'archives').