---
layout: page
permalink: /theme-setup/index.html
title: Theme Setup
description: "Instructions on how to install and customize the Jekyll theme So Simple."
modified: 2013-09-11
tags: [Jekyll, theme, install, setup]
---
General notes and suggestions for customizing **So Simple Theme**.
## Basic Setup for a new Jekyll site
1. [Install Jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com) and read through the documentation if you haven't already.
2. Fork the [So Simple Theme repo](https://github.com/mmistakes/so-simple-theme/fork)
3. Clone the repo you just forked.
4. Edit `_config.yml` to personalize your site.
5. Check out the sample posts in `_posts` to see examples for pulling in large feature images, assigning categories and tags, and other YAML data.
6. Read the documentation below for further customization pointers and documentation.
**Pro-tip:** Delete the `gh-pages` branch after cloning and start fresh by branching off `master`. There is a bunch of garbage in `gh-pages` used for the theme's demo site that I'm guessing you don't want on your site.
{: .notice}
---
## Setup for an Existing Jekyll site
1. Clone the following folders: `_includes`, `_layouts`, `assets`, and `images`.
2. Clone the following files and personalize content as need: `about.md`, `articles.html`, `index.html`, `tags.html`, `feed.xml`, and `sitemap.xml`.
3. Set the following variables in your `config.yml` file:
{% highlight yaml %}
title: Site Title
description: Site description for the metas.
logo: site-logo.png
disqus_shortname: shortname
search: true
#Comment out url when working locally to resolve base urls correctly
url: http://whatever.com
# Owner/author information
owner:
name: Your Name
avatar: your-photo.jpg
email: your@email.com
# Social networking links used in footer. Update and remove as you like.
twitter:
facebook:
github:
linkedin:
instagram:
tumblr:
# For Google Authorship https://plus.google.com/authorship
google_plus: "http://plus.google.com/123123123123132123"
# Analytics and webmaster tools stuff goes here
google_analytics:
google_verify:
# https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/configure/verify/ownership Option 2 content= goes here
bing_verify:
# Links to include in top navigation
# For external links add external: true
links:
- title: About
url: /about
- title: Articles
url: /articles
- title: Google
url: http://google.com
external: true
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
timezone: America/New_York
pygments: true
markdown: kramdown
# https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Permalinks
permalink: /:categories/:title
{% endhighlight %}
---
## Folder Structure
{% highlight bash %}
so-simple-theme/
├── _includes/
| ├── browser-upgrade.html #prompt to upgrade browser on < IE8
| ├── footer.html #site footer
| ├── head.html #site head
| ├── navigation.html #site navigation and masthead
| └── scripts.html #jQuery, plugins, GA, etc.
├── _layouts/
| ├── page.html #page layout
| └── post.html #post layout
├── _posts/
├── assets/
| ├── css/ #preprocessed less styles
| ├── fonts/ #icon webfonts
| ├── js/
| | ├── _main.js #main JavaScript file, plugin settings, etc
| | ├── plugins #jQuery plugins
| | └── vendor/ #jQuery and Modernizr
| └── less/
├── images #images for posts and pages
├── _config.yml #Jekyll site options
├── about.md #about page
├── articles.md #lists all posts from latest to oldest
├── index.html #homepage. lists 10 latest posts
├── tags.html #lists all posts sorted by tag
└── sitemap.xml #autogenerated sitemap for search engines
{% endhighlight %}
---
## Customization
### _config.yml
Most of the variables found here are used in the .html files found in `_includes` if you need to add or remove anything. A good place to start would be to change the title, tagline, description, and url of your site. When working locally comment out `url`[^1] or else you will get a bunch of broken links because they are absolute and prefixed with `{{ "{{ site.url " }}}}` in the various `_includes` and `_layouts`. Just remember to uncomment `url` when building for deployment or pushing to **gh-pages**...
#### Disqus Comments
Create a [Disqus](http://disqus.com) account and change `disqus_shortname` in `_config.yml` to the Disqus *shortname* you just setup. To enable commenting on a post, add the following to its front matter:
{% highlight yaml %}
comments: true
{% endhighlight %}
#### Owner/Author Information
Change your name, and avatar photo (200x200 pixels or larger), email, and social networking urls. If you want to link to an external image on Gravatar or something similiar you'll need to edit the path in `head.html` since it assumes it is located in `/images`.
Including a link to your Google+ profile has the added benefit of displaying [Google Authorship](https://plus.google.com/authorship) in Google search results if you've went ahead and applied for it.
#### Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
Your Google Analytics ID goes here along with meta tags for [Google Webmaster Tools](http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35179) and [Bing Webmaster Tools](https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/configure/verify/ownershi) site verification.
#### Top Navigation Links
Edit page/post titles and URLs to include in the site's navigation. For external links add `external: true`.
{% highlight yaml %}
# sample top navigation links
links:
- title: About Page
url: /about
- title: Articles
url: /articles
- title: Other Page
url: /other-page
- title: External Link
url: http://mademistakes.com
external: true
{% endhighlight %}
#### Simple Search
Adding the following to `_config.yml` enables search using Christian Fei's [Simple Jekyll jQuery plugin](https://github.com/christian-fei/Simple-Jekyll-Search). Clicking search will trigger a fullscreen overlay that searches post titles' using an autogenerated JSON file.
{% highlight yaml %}
search: true
{% endhighlight %}
Clicking search triggers an overlay that allows you to search by post title.
#### Other Stuff
The rest is just your average Jekyll config settings. Nothing too crazy here...
### _includes
For the most part you can leave these as is since the author/owner details are pulled from `_config.yml`. That said you'll probably want to customize the copyright stuff in `footer.html` to your liking.
### Adding Posts and Pages
There are two main content layouts: `post.html` (for posts) and `page.html` (for pages). Both have support for large **feature images** that span the full-width of the screen, and both are meant for text heavy blog posts (or articles).
#### Feature Images
A good rule of thumb is to keep feature images nice and wide so you don't push the body text too far down. An image cropped around around 1024 x 256 pixels will keep file size down with an acceptable resolution for most devices. If you want to serve these images responsively I'd suggest looking at [Picturefill](https://github.com/scottjehl/picturefill) or [Adaptive Images](http://adaptive-images.com/).
The two layouts make the assumption that the feature images live in the *images* folder. To add a feature image to a post or page just include the filename in the front matter like so.
{% highlight yaml %}
image:
feature: feature-image-filename.jpg
thumb: thumbnail-image.jpg #keep it square 200x200 px is good
{% endhighlight %}
If you want to apply attribution to a feature image use the following YAML front matter on posts or pages. Image credits appear directly below the feature image with a link back to the original source.
{% highlight yaml %}
image:
feature: feature-image-filename.jpg
credit: Michael Rose #name of the person or site you want to credit
creditlink: http://mademistakes.com #url to their site or licensing
{% endhighlight %}
#### Categories
In the sample `_posts` folder you may have noticed `category: articles` in the front matter. I like keeping all posts grouped in the same folder. If you decide to rename or add categories you will need to modify the permalink in `articles.md` along with the filename (if renaming).
For example. Say you want to group all your posts under `blog/` instead of `articles/`. In your post add `category: blog` to the front matter, rename or duplicate `articles.md` to `blog.md` and change the permalink in that file to `permalink: /blog/index.html`.
If done correctly `/blog` should be a page listing all the site's posts.
#### Post/Page Thumbnails for OG and Twitter Cards
Post and page thumbnails work the same way. These are used by [Open Graph](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/) and [Twitter Cards](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards) meta tags found in `head.html`. If you don't assign a thumbnail the image you assigned to `site.owner.avatar` in `_config.yml will be used.
Here's an example of what a tweet to your site could look like if you activate Twitter Cards and include all the metas in your post's YAML.
#### Videos
Video embeds are responsive and scale with the width of the main content block with the help of [FitVids](http://fitvidsjs.com/).
Not sure if this only effects Kramdown or if it's an issue with Markdown in general. But adding YouTube video embeds causes errors when building your Jekyll site. To fix add a space between the `
{% endhighlight %}
#### Twitter Cards
Twitter cards make it possible to attach images and post summaries to Tweets that link to your content. Summary Card meta tags have been added to `head.html` to support this, you just need to [validate and apply your domain](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards) to turn it on.
#### Link Post Type
So Simple Theme now supports **link posts**, made famous by John Gruber. To activate just add `link: http://url-you-want-linked` to the post's YAML front matter and you're done. Here's an [example of a link post]({{ site.url }}/articles/sample-link-post) if you need a visual.
---
## Theme Development
If you want to easily skin the themes' colors and fonts, take a look at `variables.less` in `assets/less/` and make the necessary changes to the color and font variables. To make development easier I setup a Grunt build script to compile/minify the LESS files into `main.min.css` and lint/concatenate/minify all scripts into `scripts.min.js`. [Install Node.js](http://nodejs.org/), then [install Grunt](http://gruntjs.com/getting-started), and then finally install the dependencies for the theme contained in `package.json`:
{% highlight bash %}
npm install
{% endhighlight %}
From the theme's root, use `grunt` to rebuild the CSS, concatenate JavaScript files, and optimize .jpg, .png, and .svg files in the `images/` folder. You can also use `grunt watch` in combination with `jekyll build --watch` to watch for updates to your LESS and JS files that Grunt will then automatically re-build as you write your code which will in turn auto-generate your Jekyll site when developing locally.
And if the command line isn't your thing (you're using Jekyll so it probably is), [CodeKit](http://incident57.com/codekit/) for Mac OS X and [Prepros](http://alphapixels.com/prepros/) for Windows are great alternatives.
---
## Questions?
Having a problem getting something to work or want to know why I setup something in a certain way? Ping me on Twitter [@mmistakes](http://twitter.com/mmistakes) or [file a GitHub Issue](https://github.com/mmistakes/so-simple-theme/issues/new).
## License
This theme is free and open source software, distributed under the [GNU General Public License]({{ site.url }}/LICENSE) version 2 or later. So feel free to use this Jekyll theme on your site without linking back to me or using a disclaimer.
If you'd like to give me credit somewhere on your blog or tweet a shout out to [@mmistakes](https://twitter.com/mmistakes), that would be pretty sweet.
[^1]: Used to generate absolute urls in *sitemap.xml*, *feed.xml*, and for canonical urls in *head.html*. Don't include a trailing `/` in your base url ie: http://mademistakes.com. When developing locally remove or comment out this line so local CSS, JS, and image assets are used.
