.md files in /content not shown on the website

[gelavat]

Hello.

If I copy the "pico\vendor\picocms\pico\content-sample\index.md" to the "pico\content\index.md" file, and edit it, the modification is not shown. All .md files that I put in the contents directory are not shown on the website. also if I install a new theme, it doesn't show the index.md file at all, only the theme. What can be the problem?

The DOM and MDSTRING php modules are enabled on the web server.

[PhrozenByte]

Pico tries to guess the content file by checking whether the file content/index.md exists. I assume wrong file permissions, so that your webserver / PHP process can't access the file. Check the file permissions. You can overrule Pico's autodiscorvery by setting the content_dir option in your config/config.yml (create a new file, don't just edit the config.yml.template), even though I assume this won't work either due to invalid file permissions. However, you'll force Pico to use that directory and should receive an PHP error instead (usually a white/blank page, check your webserver's error.log resp. PHP's error log then)

[gelavat]

Thanks for your support. It was not file permissions related. I digged into that and in the end I figured out that the modification of the .md files was correct, but that it was the "clean-blog" theme that was causing the issue. Unfortunately this was the first theme I tried and it doesn't work. Trying another like the "Travelify" theme works fine.

Could you please check this clean-blog theme, as it seems that the index.md contents is not displayed on the site, only the logo is there? I tried again and did things like described, but still nothing displayed. You should try installing it fresh from their github source. That would help.

[PhrozenByte]

Could you please check this clean-blog theme, as it seems that the index.md contents is not displayed on the site, only the logo is there?

Please refer to the theme developer instead. Custom plugins and themes are made by 3rd parties, unfortunately we can't provide support for this 3rd party content. You should receive help there.

[gelavat]

The issue is that almost all themes are not installable nor working out of the box. I think this is not good, because it hurts Pico CMS, whereas it is not your fault.

Themes and plugins functionalities need to have some checks from Pico to make sure that they comply to minimal requirements: must be working, clear and not be implementing hacking systems. You should perform regular little checks (and correction requests to theme providers) about that or at least at each new release of Pico CMS. I posted another issue in this regards.

[mayamcdougall]

Hello @gelavat.

I'd be happy to help you with whatever Theme related issues you're having, however I'd like to get some things out of the way beforehand.

I apologize in advance that this is going to be a bit blunt. I don't have a ton of extra time right now, nor will I for the next few days and I'm dealing with some heavy real life issues.

You have a brand new GitHub account, and you've opened at least 7 new issues, total, across Pico and several of its themes in the last day alone. (And yes, I realize that some of these were in response to @PhrozenByte's suggestion, so I'm taking that into consideration).

If you're a new user who's legitimately confused and trying to land on a good starting theme, I'll be happy to help you get whichever theme you'd like fully working for you. From my perspective though, it looks a bit like you're just trying to punch holes in as many places as possible to kick up some noise. If that's the case, it is very not appreciated at the moment.

As stated by @PhrozenByte, all of Pico's themes are community submissions. Due to the flexible nature of Pico and Twig, many of these themes work entirely differently from one another. Some are ready-to-go website templates while some are more barebones starting places or frameworks.

The issue of how to validate theme and plugin submissions has been an ongoing discussion (https://github.com/picocms/picocms.github.io/issues/45) for some time now.

Some of the Themes recently added to the gallery (https://github.com/picocms/picocms.github.io/pull/47) were older themes I added in a single large batch in an effort to deprecate a Themes page that used to be on our Wiki. I can guarantee that I was able to get every theme in that batch working, however, some of them did involve a small amount of trial-and-error and/or fumbling around clumsily written documentation from the theme's creator.

And unfortunately, that's kind of the bigger problem. Not only would it be an enormous undertaking to rewrite (and standardize) the documentation and/or implementation of each of these themes, it would require at least some effort on the part of the original creators. I can't exactly reach into their git repo and change their documentation on them.

Many of the themes developed for Pico were unfortunately written once, then forgotten about. These developers have moved on to new projects, maybe they don't even use Pico anymore. But they left their code open in hopes that someone else might find it useful.

So, no, many of the themes in the gallery are not ready to go "out of the box". There's actually been some discussion over at https://github.com/picocms/picocms.github.io/pull/47 on adding a "Ready to Go" label to some of the themes. But even those themes that I'd mark "Ready to go" will still require a bit of research into their documentation to learn how the developer intended them to be used. This isn't Wordpress, and the themes aren't one-click to apply. In most cases, they act as a starting HTML (Twig) template for you to make your own.

Pico will always be a bit more involved of a CMS just because of its flexible nature. Some dirty work is usually required, whether it be server administration, writing HTML/Twig to customize your site's appearance, or writing PHP plugins to extend Pico's capabilities.

If you're a web developer, and you'd like to make some more "ready to go" Themes that fit your expectations, we'd be happy to have them in our gallery. It could always use more options.

In the meantime though, Pico is maintained by a very small team at the moment, and we do what we can. As I stated in the beginning, I can (hopefully) help get you going with whichever theme you'd like to use. And, you're right, some of them are definitely not as user-friendly as they could be. But changing that is out-of-scope for what we can do as a project, and from my perspective, it's better to have more theme options available then less.

[gelavat]

Hello Maya,

Thank you for your comments. It is good to know that there was a discussion already about that, I didn't know, but I see that the risk I fear is also shared with others, so it is good :)

Regarding me trying to make noise, it is not the case. I respect a lot the work that you have done you people with Pico CMS. It is just that I like mentioning when I see things not working, rather than just moving to something else, not mentioning what is going wrong like many do. I think it is honorable as it helps the community and can help fix issues and improve the product, and more generally provide an outside feedback that is usually always productive.

Thank you very much for your help proposal to install a theme, it is very nice. And sorry for your real life issues and you still helping me it is very kind. I hope it will resolve soon. I have been able to figure out what was going wrong for a few of them, trying to ask questions there and providing solutions. So it is fine for what I need, thanks! As you said, themes usually work but we need to tweak things a bit, and this is the part that is difficult for Pico noobs like me.

I provided some thoughts about all that and suggestions in the last comment on issue https://github.com/picocms/Pico/issues/593 I think it could be helping towards this direction quite a lot already. I suggest continuing on that thread there so it is more related to the subject.

Thanks for your help!

[mayamcdougall]

I'm only going to say a little here, and then continue over on #593. <-- Nevermind, I'm a liar. 😂

First of all, no worries about anything. I was a little stressed the other day, and I apologize for being blunt. 😅

As long as your intentions are sincere (and you're not just trolling, lol), we absolutely welcome any and all input you want to provide. ❤️

We can't work miracles, there's only a few of us, but we are always open to suggestions.

If you find that you like it here on GitHub, and want to help projects out, here's my suggestion. If you find old/inaccurate documentation somewhere, in addition to opening an issue, you could always offer to make the changes for them. This would likely be especially welcomed on some of our Themes, since the original developers have often moved on.

(Edit: I see you have actually made some suggestions on the Bulma theme, but I wrote this comment before seeing that.)

Even Pico itself has a long overdue documentation problem... *cough* https://github.com/picocms/picocms.github.io/pull/6, https://github.com/picocms/picocms.github.io/issues/7.

Documentation is hard. It's difficult and time consuming on its own. Writing good documentation is even harder. 😒

It seems like it should be easy, which in turn makes it easier to be critical of it when something's wrong. Just remember that often, writing the documentation for your code can be just as complex as the code itself. And keep in mind that not all contributions to open source need to be code contributions. Helping out with other aspects of projects can be just as valuable. 😉

[gelavat]

Hello Maya. Ok no problem it's fine.

Yes I know, doc is not so well liked by many people, but such important. And yes, giving help for only that is already a very good improvement. This is what I am aiming to do. I provided already an installation and customization section to the clean-blog theme as a PR. It has been accepted and now it is compatible without any issue to install the theme and customize it easily, at least for basic things.

I will try to continue with a few other themes. I think this is the only thing that was really missing, the updated installation instructions and also the customization because of course as soon as we have installed it we want to customize it, change the titles, and so on and then we don't know how to do that.

So this would be the solution I think, to continue updating these installation instructions. In case the repo owners do not answer, I would suggest we fork the theme and continue to improve it ourselves, and change the address do download the theme. This way we wouldn't be blocked by that. As these themes are MIT licenced usually, this shouldn't be a problem.

[mayamcdougall]

I think this is the only thing that was really missing

Then I think you need to look at the Docs a little closer. 😂

I'm kidding, but they're still a real mess in my opinion.

They were supposed to be rewritten years ago to be easier for new users to follow... maybe someday we'll finish that. P=

In case the repo owners do not answer, I would suggest we fork the theme and continue to improve it ourselves

This is absolutely a possibility. (It'd just be a lot of work for whoever wants to do it, lol)

The Themes gallery entries each have a freeform info property where we specify things like By: or Ported By: / Original By:. Although it's never happened, if a theme were to be forked, we could easily make it say something like Originally By: and Continued By: to continue give credit to the original creator while linking to something more up-to-date on the Learn More button.

I think in this case if it were just an update to documentation, we'd want to see a decent amount of effort put into the fork and not just some typo fixes. I guess what I mean is that the changes should be worth forking for, but it does sound like it could work okay.

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