Themes that works out of the box?

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Hello,
I use zola in the past and found it very interesting. Today, I was poking around something and wanted to publish it using zola … well that was not a smooth experiences. I have tested 7 themes, and whaaa not all support search (for me search is a minimal feature), some mix their content with the demo version so it is impossible to get a proper website build without intensive change in the themes. And the worst, is the amount of themes that require you to add a tons of element in the configuration …

So I imagine that a new user will cry and leave the project … and honestly I was disappointed

  • For me the project should have a default theme with all feature available
  • All theme should be describe with their limitation, their compatibility version, etc or it should be listed as partial theme…
  • The getting started guide, should suggest the default theme
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‘abridge’ has a working search … very well done and well organized.
Also has the most helpful use of localization.

The doc is generally complete with basic terminal copy move commands.

I would recommend copying all the content as laid out in the documentation.

There is one error

Do not comment out the theme line in the config.toml file to get it working. unless you copy not only the content but everything from themes to root.

theme = "abridge"

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I did a comparison of them at one point, you can find that bellow. You will notice all the ones with search enabled are at the top of the list, this is because search is a minimum requirement for me as well! I even went as far as making Abridge work with both Stork and TinySearch, and contributing some code to TinySearch.

elasticsearch: https://abridge.netlify.app/

tinysearch: Abridge | Fast & Lightweight Zola Theme

stork: Abridge | Fast & Lightweight Zola Theme

When I first started building for Zola I was literally digging deep into the code of each theme, I learn best by example.

The documentation on my theme “Abridge” is fairly long winded… but that’s because it supports a ton of features… so it is kinda hard to avoid. I hope to spend more time improving the docs as well as the config but at the moment the theme serves my purposes and I am far too busy with work related things.

I think it would be fair to say that mostly developers would be comfortable with zola, it’s not wordpress… BUT I previously came from using HUGO, and I have to say that I feel so much more at home with zola, I absolutely love it!

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I learned so much from your theme, even create my own theme in one day using copy paste codes from your theme. I am coming from WordPress and thinking to consider zola as a new home for my website and future products. But unable to achieve modify image tag without using shorcodes, which is you can easily achieve in hugo with layouts/_dagault/_markup/render-image.html file, or unable to add classess in paragraph like {.image}. Is there is any way to achieve it without writing shortcode?

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@masoodalam51 I don’t think you can add classes without using a short code (at least my searching has not turned up a way).

I’ve also learned a lot from Abridge. I was already using another theme that looked the way I wanted so I ported the feature across from Abridge and added an attribution.

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I know I can’t use classess without shortcodes, which is not a case in if we use Hugo. I wish Zola team bring that feature inside the Zola.

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This is something you would have to contribute to the CommonMark parser we use: GitHub - raphlinus/pulldown-cmark

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Abridge is a great theme. But I really miss the vast amount of themes that Hugo has available. I know it will come as the community grows.

I used to use Jekyll before, it was a nightmare But I absolutely loved this theme for it:
GitHub - cotes2020/jekyll-theme-chirpy: A minimal, responsive and feature-rich Jekyll theme for technical writing..

Zola only has very few good themes and Abridge is at the top of the list, even though I am not a huge fan of some of the visual choices

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I would be interested in knowing specifics of some of the design/visual changes you would make. I am not an artist so please give as detailed examples as you can. Anything that I agree with I would likely incorporate into Abridge when I have free time, it would be best to post the requests to the issue tracker on Abridge: Issues · Jieiku/abridge · GitHub

I cannot promise I would make all the requested changes, but if you look at the issue tracker history, particularly the ones made by user simbleau. You will see that I do find them useful and try to incorporate as many as I can, sometimes even features I do not agree with I am able to still include as optional features that can be enabled.

Here are some sites using Abridge or a modification of it:

https://simbleau.github.io/blog/

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Ooh, thanks for the reply and the links, I am a big fan of the look of the last blog https://jacoblewallen.com/

Will look at some of the changes they incorporated and tweak them to my liking.

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