This site has been generated using Pelican 3.3 for over two years - and I finally found some time to upgrade to the current version of Pelican, 3.6.3. This is how I did the upgrade.

I decided to be lazy and do the upgrade in-place, instead of creating a new virtualenv and copying the content & settings over. Luckily, this worked out OK, after a bit of fiddling around.

I also decided, rather cavalierly, to upgrade all the packages in the virtualenv to their latest versions while I was at it. To do this, I upgraded pip, then used pip-review. To upgrade pip & install pip-review system wide, run this on the command line:

$ sudo -H pip install --upgrade pip
$ sudo -H pip install pip-review

Then upgrade eveything in the sites virtualenv:

$ sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev
$ workon duncanlock.net
$ pip-review …

I had a feature request for automatic figure numbering, like latex. I was revamping this plugin for Pelican 3.3 anyway - and this didn’t seem too hard - so I decided to add it.

So, the Better Figures & Images plugin now supports automatic figure numbering. To enable this for all posts, just add this to your config file:

FIGURE_NUMBERS = True

If you want to enable this per post, just add this to the metadata at the top of the post:

for restructuredText add this:

:figure_numbers: true

and for Markdown add this:

figure_numbers: true

There are quite a few changes in Pelican 3.3 - most of them minor, but a few which might mean making some changes to your site in order to upgrade. This is what I did to move my site from Pelican 3.2 to 3.3.

The change that had the biggest impact and took the most work was around image linking - caused by a combination of things. I think I was doing it wrong before and things changed in a way that meant this no longer worked. I also had to update my Better Figures & Images plugin to take this into account.

Previously, I’d been linking to my images like this, both in my theme:

/* Theme CSS Image Link */
background: #2C71B8 url(/static/images/blueprint-background.png) repeat;

{# Theme HTML/Jinja image link #}
<meta name="twitter:image" content …

I’ve recently been corresponding with Denny Dias, from Brazil, who’s converted his blog over to Pelican - and we’ve been helping each other out a bit with building themes and whatnot.

He’s written up his conversion & theme building process - and was generous enough to credit me after he borrowed some of my theme’s logic, from this blog’s GitHub repo.

As he’s such a nice guy - and as I’ve just borrowed his tagsort jinja filter for my blog’s tag page, I though I’d return the favour - cheers Deny! :)

The Pelican quickstart site that we created in Part 1 used the default theme - which you will probably want to change or, at least, customize. In this post I break down the Pelican theme I created for this site and show you exactly how it’s built. I’ll be going through each part of the theme in depth, explaining why I did things that way and how each part works.

The theme for this site is professional grade - high quality, polished and responsive. It puts the focus on the reader, is 100% easy to read and works flawlessly at any screen size, including mobiles & tablets. It also takes into account best practices for both social media and Problematic, check error messages! : :abbr:`SEO (Search Engine Optimization)`, so that you can make the most of your writing.

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