Beautiful Jekyll Next is a ready-to-use template to help you create a beautiful website quickly. Perfect for personal sites, blogs, or simple project websites.
This is a fork of Beautiful Jekyll, with customizations to make it more suitable for my needs such as the following:
- Newer version of Bootstrap
- Added author avatars for blog posts
- Allow custom styling for giscus comments
- Added different styles for GitHub badges on blog posts
- Pull Request builds can be previewed before merging, making it easier to review changes between versions
For a full list of differences, see https://github.com/daattali/beautiful-jekyll/compare/master...LizardByte:master
- Features
- Usage
- Add your own content
- Customizing parameters for each page
- Supported parameters
- Next steps
- Credits
- SIMPLE: The primary goal of Beautiful Jekyll Next is to allow anyone to create a website in a few minutes.
- Modern: Uses the latest best practices and technologies to achieve nearly perfect scores on Google Chrome's Audit.
- Mobile-first: Designed to look great on both large-screen and small-screen (mobile) devices.
- Highly customizable: Many personalization settings such as changing the background color/image, adding a logo.
- Flexible usage: Use Beautiful Jekyll Next directly on GitHub or via a Ruby gem. (TODO: create a Ruby gem)
- SEO and social media support: Customize how your site looks on Google and when shared on social media.
- Comments support: Add comments to any page using either Disqus, Facebook comments, Utterances, Staticman, giscus, or CommentBox.
- Tags: Any blog post can be tagged with keywords, and an index page is automatically generated.
- Analytics: Integrate Google Analytics, or other analytics platforms, to track visits to your website.
- Search: Let users easily find any page using a Search button in the navigation bar.
- Photos support: Any page can have a full-width cover photo and thumbnail.
- RSS: An RSS feed is automatically created, so you can even host a podcast easily with Beautiful Jekyll Next.
First, read through GitHub's documentation
This theme is recommended to be installed as a remote theme, so you can easily update it in the future.
remote_theme: LizardByte/beautiful-jekyll-nextremote_theme: LizardByte/beautiful-jekyll-next@masterTo add pages to your site, you can either write a Markdown file (.md) or you can write an HTML file.
It's much easier to write Markdown than HTML,
so that's the recommended approach (here's a great tutorial
if you need to learn Markdown in 5 minutes).
To see an example of a Markdown file, click on any file that ends in .md, for example aboutme.md.
On that page you can see some nicely formatted text (there's a word in bold, a link, a few bullet points).
If you click on the code button, you'll see the Markdown code that generated the pretty text.
In contrast, look at tags.html. That's how you write HTML... not as pretty.
So stick with Markdown if you don't know HTML.
Any Markdown or HTML file that you create will be available on your website under
https://<yourusername>.github.io/<pagename>. For example, if you create a file about.md (or about.html)
then it'll exist at https://<yourusername>.github.io/about.
Files you create inside the _posts directory will be treated as blog entries.
You can look at the existing files there to get an idea of how to write blog posts.
Note the format of the blog post files... they must follow the naming convention of YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.md.
One last important thing: To have your new pages use this template and not just be plain HTML pages, you must add YAML front matter to the top of each page:
---
---
This is where you'll be able to give each page some extra parameters (such as a title, a subtitle, an image, etc. - below is a list of all parameters). Add any parameters you want between these two dashed lines, for example:
---
title: Contact me
subtitle: Here you'll find all the ways to get in touch with me
---
If you don't want to use any parameters on a page, you still need to use the two dashed lines. If you don't, then your file will be shown as-is without the Beautiful Jekyll Next template.
You can look at the top of
aboutme.md as an example.
Important takeaway: ALWAYS add the YAML front matter, which is two lines of three dashes, to EVERY page. If you have any parameters, they go between the two lines.
Below is a list of the parameters that Beautiful Jekyll Next supports
(any of these can be added to the YAML front matter of any page). Remember to also look in the _config.yml file to
see additional site-wide settings. If there's a parameter that you want to apply to the entire site instead of one
specific page, check out this FAQ answer.
These are the basic YAML parameters that you are most likely to use on most pages.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| title | Page or blog post title |
| subtitle | Short description of page or blog post that goes under the title |
| tags | List of tags to categorize the post. Separate the tags with commas and place them inside square brackets. Example: [personal, analysis, finance] |
| cover-img | Include a large full-width image at the top of the page. You can either provide the path to a single image (eg. "/path/to/img") , or a list of images to cycle through (eg. ["/path/img1", "/path/img2"]). If you want to add a caption to an image, then you must use the list notation (use [] even if you have only one image), and each image should be provided as "/path/to/img" : "Caption of image". |
| thumbnail-img | For blog posts, if you want to add a thumbnail that will show up in the feed, use thumbnail-img: /path/to/image. If no thumbnail is provided, then cover-img will be used as the thumbnail. You can use thumbnail-img: "" to disable a thumbnail. |
| comments | If you want do add comments to a specific page, use comments: true. Comments only work if you enable one of the comments providers (Facebook, disqus, staticman, utterances, giscus, CommentBox) in _config.yml file. Comments are automatically enabled on blog posts but not on other pages; to turn comments off for a specific post, use comments: false. |
| mathjax | If you want to use LaTeX formulas, you need to enable MathJax. Note that in MathJax you need to use $$ and \\( to start and end expressions |
These parameters let you control what information shows up when a page is shown in a search engine (such as Google) or gets shared on social media (such as Twitter/Facebook).
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| share-title | A title for the page. If not provided, then title will be used, and if that's missing then the site title (from _config.yml) is used. |
| share-description | A brief description of the page. If not provided, then subtitle will be used, and if that's missing then an excerpt from the page content is used. |
| share-img | The image to show. If not provided, then cover-img or thumbnail-img will be used if one of them is provided. |
These are parameters that you may not use often, but can come in handy sometimes.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| author | Specify the author of a blog post (useful if a website has multiple authors). |
| readtime | If you want a post to show how many minutes it will take to read it, use readtime: true. |
| show-avatar | If you have an avatar configured in the _config.yml but you want to turn it off on a specific page, use show-avatar: false. |
| social-share | By default, every blog post has buttons to share the page on social media. If you want to turn this feature off, use social-share: false. |
| nav-short | By default, the navigation bar gets shorter after scrolling down the page. If you want the navigation bar to always be short on a certain page, use nav-short: true |
| gh-repo | If you want to show GitHub buttons at the top of a post, this sets the GitHub repo name (eg. LizardByte/beautiful-jekyll-next). You must also use the gh-badge parameter to specify what buttons to show. |
| gh-badge | Select which GitHub buttons to display. Available options are: [star, watch, fork, follow]. You must also use the gh-repo parameter to specify the GitHub repo. |
| last-updated | If you want to show that a blog post was updated after it was originally released, you can specify an "Updated on" date. |
| layout | What type of page this is (default is post for blog posts and page for other pages). See Page types section below for more information. |
These are advanced parameters that are only useful for people who need very fine control over their website.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| footer-extra | If you want to include extra content below the social media icons in the footer, create an HTML file in the _includes/ folder (for example _includes/myinfo.html) and set footer-extra to the name of the file (for example footer-extra: myinfo.html). Accepts a single file or a list of files. |
| before-content | Similar to footer-extra, but used for including HTML before the main content of the page (below the title). |
| after-content | Similar to footer-extra, but used for including HTML after the main content of the page (above the footer). |
| head-extra | Similar to footer-extra, but used if you have any HTML code that needs to be included in the <head> tag of the page. |
| language | HTML language code to be set on the page's <html> element. |
| full-width | By default, page content is constrained to a standard width. Use full-width: true to allow the content to span the entire width of the window. |
| js | List of local JavaScript files to include in the page (eg. /assets/js/mypage.js) |
| ext-js | List of external JavaScript files to include in the page (eg. //cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/underscore.js/1.8.2/underscore-min.js). External JavaScript files that support Subresource Integrity (SRI) can be specified using the href and sri parameters eg.href: "//code.jquery.com/jquery-3.1.1.min.js"sri: "sha256-hVVnYaiADRTO2PzUGmuLJr8BLUSjGIZsDYGmIJLv2b8=" |
| css | List of local CSS files to include in the page |
| ext-css | List of external CSS files to include in the page. External CSS files using SRI (see ext-js parameter) are also supported. |
- post: To write a blog post, add a markdown or HTML file in the
_postsfolder. As long as you give it YAML front matter (the two lines of three dashes), it will automatically be rendered like a blog post. Look at the existing blog post files to see examples of how to use YAML parameters in blog posts. - page: Any page outside the
_postsfolder that uses YAML front matter will have a very similar style to blog posts. - home: The home layout is meant to act as the homepage of your blog posts... it will display all your blog posts,
sorted from newest to oldest. A file using the
homelayout must be namedindex.html(notindex.mdor anything else!). - minimal: If you want to create a page with minimal styling (i.e., without the bulky navigation bar and footer),
assign
layout: minimalto the YAML front matter. - If you want to completely bypass the template engine and write your own HTML page, simply omit the YAML front matter. Only do this if you know how to write HTML!
Congratulations on making it this far! You now have all the tools to easily build a beautiful website for free.
-
After you get comfortable with the basics of writing in Markdown, I suggest taking a look at this sample post and the code that created it to learn some more advanced tips about Markdown.
-
Since this is a fork of Beautiful Jekyll, you may want to check out Beautiful-Jekyll to learn more about the features of Beautiful Jekyll.
-
Remember that Beautiful Jekyll Next is built on top of Jekyll. This means that reading through the Jekyll documentation will introduce you to many more features that you might find useful!
Thanks to Dean Attali for creating the original Beautiful Jekyll and to all the other contributors who made this project possible.
