Is remote_theme supported?

[chfast]

I tried to use

remote_theme: "daattali/beautiful-jekyll"

in my GitHub Pages config. This does not seem to produce good results (https://chfast.github.io/How-to-explicit-NOT-initialize-variables-in-cpp/).

Should that work?

[daattali]

This is a fairly new feature of github (allowing custom themes to use remote_theme), and I haven't yet found the time to make beautiful-jekyll compatible with that. So it does not work yet.

If someone wants to help making the necessary changes, I would appreciate the help!

[dkoprowski]

Hi @daattali - some news on that :) ?

[daattali]

Sorry @dkoprowski I still haven't looked! If you're familiar with it, I would not oppose to a pull request if you'd like to help :)

[dkoprowski]

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with Ruby and Gems ;)

[abelcheung]

Some great (and bad) news: I have managed to using it as remote_theme in Github Page (running in one of my pet project right now, thanks for the great work!), though quite a lot of files have to be cloned manually in order to get it to work.

With my (limited) understand of the remote_theme feature, the following 4 folders can be utilized without copying:

• _layouts
• _includes
• _sass (probably can be ignored since this theme is not using sass)
• assets

So the major obstacle probably involves moving css, javascript, images and all sort of include files to their proper place, and update links / references to them. I'm still new to Jekyll and even Ruby in general, so perhaps somebody more experienced can correct me if anything is missing. :)

[abelcheung]

For those interested, one can check out my example repo which is using a restructured beautiful-jekyll as remote theme. At a minimum, only a few config files and top level pages need to be copied in order to establish a working site. In particular, notice addition of plugin entries and remote_theme setting in _config.yml.

On second thought, I doubt this feature goes against daattali's interest, since the essence of remote_theme is to avoid forking and only copy files necessary for overriding defaults, thus not included into fork count (as an easily monitored user count of this theme). Unless daattali gives the green light and users do really want the feature, perhaps pull request won't be submitted.

[daattali]

@abelcheung I would be happy for a PR to support this! The remote_theme option seems to be much cleaner and easier for end users, which is my ultimate goal. I don't care about the numbers as much.

[daattali]

remote_theme is now supported