Website for PyCon Israel 2024

Website built with Pelican, using a PyCon-Israel-Flex theme based on Flex.

Technicalities:

The Python side is managed by Poetry. Use poetry install to get the dependencies.

The theme styling is built with gulp and other npm tools. If you want to change anything in the CSS,

• Preparation: Go to the folder website_2024/themes/PyCon-Israel-Flex, and there run the command npm install
• "Compilation" (mostly of the Less sources): Run the command npm run build

When you want to build the site itself, use make html from the website_2024 folder. It puts the built site in output. You can use make clean to remove everything if you want to rebuild from scratch; but it doesn't clean the theme files.

You can also use make devserver for the HTML, and npm run watch for the styling -- these create watchers which update the output as you change the source files.

Pages are in website_2024/content/pages, and are written in Markdown. At the top of each page there is a block of metadata. Of these, the Title field is very visible, but also critical are the Slug and Lang fields which define the page identity (the Hebrew and English versions of a page should have the same Slug; otherwise, different pages should have different Slugs). The page_number field determines the order of the page in the list of pages in the sidebar.

The home page content is defined like other pages, using files homepage.md and homepage-he.md in content/pages; these contain mostly HTML, since the homepage is not an "article" like other pages. The metadata in these files has some unique fields, to choose the different templates and to save the page as index.html.

The home page buttons and top is defined in the templates website_2024/themes/PyCon-Israel-Flex/templates/homepage.html and .../homepage-he.html. In the original template that came with the Flex theme, this page lists articles (blog posts), but we don't want that. The original template was kept for reference as index.html.orig.

Other interesting files to look at:

• The settings are defined in website_2024/pelicanconf.py (for development) and publishconf.py (for "production").
• The sidebar is defined in website_2024/themes/PyCon-Israel-Flex/templates/partial/sidebar.html
• The footer (currently still default, to be changed) is in website_2024/themes/PyCon-Israel-Flex/templates/partial/footer.html
• All (non-partial) templates extend website_2024/themes/PyCon-Israel-Flex/templates/base.html -- that means that template defines structure for everything.

References of software used:

• Pelican: You can start at https://docs.getpelican.com/en/latest/content.html
• Flex, the base for the theme here: https://github.com/alexandrevicenzi/Flex
  • The intention is to have our theme serve many years, so we're keeping on the side a repo of the theme alone. You can mostly ignore it for now -- work inside the website repo; but that's why we try to keep things like the year in settings rather than the template source. The theme-only repo is https://github.com/Hamakor/PyCon-Israel-Flex
  • Also for future reference: https://github.com/AmirMahmood/Flex-RTL (it is based on an old version of Flex, though)
• The Pelican plugin for image processing (not yet in use): https://github.com/pelican-plugins/image-process