Seafoam 2.5.0 Released

It’s time for a new update to Seafoam, the website theme currently in use here (on my Blog) and by my wider site.

The biggest change this update brings is the addition of period archive (i.e. daily, month, and yearly) archive pages. I’m actually not sure why they weren’t include previously, although it is possible that the feature (in Pelican) didn’t yet exist at the time this theme was first created.

This update also moves from my namespace plugins to the same plugins maintained by the larger Pelican community (see upgrading for configuration changes required on your side).

Upgrading

Upgrading should is straight forward. I haven’t broken anything on purpose since v2.0.0 came out.

To install or to upgrade, you can use pip:

pip install seafoam --upgrade

If you’re already running Pelican v4.5 (or newer) and only using namespace plugins, then the required plugins will automatically load. However, most will have to update your pelicanconf.py to point to the new plugin names:

# pelicanconf.py

PLUGINS = [
    # 'minchin.pelican.jinja_filters',  # <-- remove this line
    # 'minchin.pelican.plugins.image_process',  # <-- remove this line
    'pelican.plugins.jinja_filters',
    'pelican.plugins.image_process',
    # others, as desired...
]

To be clear, Seafoam still supports Pelican 3 (i.e. you don’t need to upgrade to Pelican 4.5 quite yet) and the latest versions of the two required plugins support back to Pelican 3 as well.

Future Plans

I’ve been working a bunch of late to update the plugins used by this blog, and it got me thinking that perhaps I could/should write a plugin to complement the theme. At a very basic level, it could used to feed the theme version into the global (Pelican) configuration so it could be included in the footer. But expanding on that idea, it could semi-automatically ensure that your Pelican site is configured as needed (plugins included, image process configured, theme selected) to speed up first setting up your site. The other place that it could be interesting is to use it for certain formatting pieces; for example, v2.4.7 was released to fix table formatting, but it did that by applying Bootstrap’s table formatting rules to all tables on the site, whereas a plugin could apply the right HTML class to only those tables within the body of articles (so if you use tables for formatting somewhere, it won’t blow up your site). Nothing has been started yet, but I’m excited by the possibilities.

Also, as I wrote previously, this theme is based on Bootstrap 3, and I’d figured I’d skip Bootstrap 4 and go straight to Bootstrap 5. Bootstrap 5 is still in alpha testing, and I haven’t done anything on this since last time, so this is likely a long way out.

Changelog

See my previous post for earlier changelog entries.

Version 2.4.7 — April 17, 2021

• bug: apply table formatting without requiring the .table class (as is normally required by Bootstrap)

Version 2.5.0 — May 15, 2021

• feature: add stylized period archive pages
• bug: fix 404 page layout issues and typos
• support: upgrades from minchin.pelican.jinja-filters to pelican-jinja-filters (It’s the same plugin, just under a new name on PyPI and packaged as a namespace plugin for Pelican 4.5 or newer.)
• support: upgrades from minchin.pelican.plugins.image-process to pelican-image-process (It’s the same plugin, just under a new name on PyPI and packaged as a namespace plugin for Pelican 4.5 or newer.)