Poole

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tells the story of a lawyer investigating the connection of two persons, Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde. Chief among the novel's supporting cast is a man by the name of Mr. Poole, Dr. Jekyll's loyal butler.

Poole is the butler for Jekyll, the static site generator. It's designed and developed by @mdo to provide a clear and concise foundational setup for any Jekyll site. It does so by furnishing a full vanilla Jekyll install with example templates, pages, posts, and styles.

Poole

See Poole in action with the demo site.

There are currently two official themes built on Poole:

Individual theme feedback and bug reports should be submitted to the theme's individual repository.

Contents

Usage

1. Install dependencies

Poole is built on Jekyll and uses its built-in SCSS compiler to generate our CSS. Before getting started, you'll need to install the Jekyll gem:

$ gem install jekyll

Windows users: Windows users have a bit more work to do, but luckily @juthilo has your back with his Run Jekyll on Windows guide.

Need syntax highlighting? Poole includes support for Pygments or Rouge, so install your gem of choice to make use of the built-in styling. Read more about this in the Jekyll docs.

2a. Quick start

To help anyone with any level of familiarity with Jekyll quickly get started, Poole includes everything you need for a basic Jekyll site. To that end, just download Poole and start up Jekyll.

2b. Roll your own Jekyll site

Folks wishing to use Jekyll's templates and styles can do so with a little bit of manual labor. Download Poole and then copy what you need (likely _layouts/, *.html files, atom.xml for RSS, and public/ for CSS, JS, etc.).

3. Running locally

To see your Jekyll site with Poole applied, start a Jekyll server. In Terminal, from /poole (or whatever your Jekyll site's root directory is named):

$ jekyll serve

Open http://localhost:4000 in your browser, and voilà.

4. Serving it up

If you host your code on GitHub, you can use GitHub Pages to host your project.

  1. Fork this repo and switch to the gh-pages branch.
    1. If you're using a custom domain name, modify the CNAME file to point to your new domain.
    2. If you're not using a custom domain name, modify the baseurl in _config.yml to point to your GitHub Pages URL. Example: for a repo at github.com/username/poole, use http://username.github.io/poole/. Be sure to include the trailing slash.
  2. Done! Head to your GitHub Pages URL or custom domain.

No matter your production or hosting setup, be sure to verify the baseurl option file and CNAME settings. Not applying this correctly can mean broken styles on your site.

Options

Poole includes some customizable options, typically applied via classes on the <body> element.

Rems, font-size, and scaling

Poole is built almost entirely with rems (instead of pixels). rems are like ems, but instead of building on the immediate parent's font-size, they build on the root element, <html>.

By default, we use the following:

html {
  font-size: 16px;
  line-height: 1.5;
}
@media (min-width: 38em) {
  html {
    font-size: 20px;
  }
}

To easily scale your site's typography and components, simply customize the base font-sizes here.

Install as a gem-based theme

Jekyll encourage the use of bundler to manage themes and plugins. Themes can be packaged as Ruby gems since Jekyll 3.3. If you don't intend to modify the theme a lot, this is a nice way of focusing on your content and benefits from theme updates.

1. Install theme

  1. Create a folder that will be your Jekyll source directory, e.g blog.
  2. Create a Gemfile in your source directory to list all theme dependencies, it should looks like this:
# frozen_string_literal: true

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "jekyll", "~> 3.7.0"
gem "jekyll-theme-poole", "~> 2.0"

2. Configuration

  1. Run bundle install to install all theme dependencies.
  2. Copy _config.yml, index.html, 404.html (and about.md) from this repository's example files to your source directory.
  3. Run bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload to preview your website locally.

If you list the files in your source directory, don't be surprised if you only see:

├── 404.html      # default 404 page template
├── Gemfile       # bundler configuration
├── Gemfile.lock  # bundler version lock
├── _config.yml   # jekyll configuration
├── _posts        # your posts are here
├── _site         # default destination build directory
├── about.md      # default example page
└── index.html    # list all the posts on the homepage

:bulb: When you use gem-based themes, the themes files don't appear in your source directory, they're packaged within the gem.

If you wonder where the original theme files are, bundler allows you to show a gem content:

tree $(bundle show jekyll-theme-poole)
├── LICENSE.md
├── README.md
├── _includes
│   └── head.html
├── _layouts
│   ├── default.html
│   ├── home.html
│   ├── page.html
│   └── post.html
├── _sass
│   ├── _base.scss
│   ├── _code.scss
│   ├── _layout.scss
│   ├── _masthead.scss
│   ├── _message.scss
│   ├── _pagination.scss
│   ├── _posts.scss
│   ├── _syntax.scss
│   ├── _type.scss
│   └── _variables.scss
└── assets
    ├── apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png
    ├── favicon.ico
    └── styles.scss

If you want to customize the theme, you'll have to copy the files you need to modify in your source directory. Report to jekyll's documentation to learn how to override a theme.

Development

Poole has two branches, but only one is used for active development.

  • master for development. All pull requests should be to submitted against master.
  • gh-pages for our hosted site, which includes our analytics tracking code. Please avoid using this branch.

CSS is handled via Jeykll's built-in Sass compiler. Source Sass files are located in _sass/, included into styles.scss, and compile to styles.css.

Author

Mark Otto

License

Open sourced under the MIT license.

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