pelican 4.0.0

Static site generator supporting reStructuredText and Markdown source content.

Pelican

Pelican is a static site generator, written in Python.

• Write content in reStructuredText or Markdown using your editor of choice
• Includes a simple command line tool to (re)generate site files
• Easy to interface with version control systems and web hooks
• Completely static output is simple to host anywhere

Features

Pelican currently supports:

• Chronological content (e.g., articles, blog posts) as well as static pages
• Integration with external services (e.g., Google Analytics and Disqus)
• Site themes (created using Jinja2 templates)
• Publication of articles in multiple languages
• Generation of Atom and RSS feeds
• Syntax highlighting via Pygments
• Importing existing content from WordPress, Dotclear, and other services
• Fast rebuild times due to content caching and selective output writing

Check out Pelican’s documentation for further information.

How to get help, contribute, or provide feedback

See our contribution submission and feedback guidelines.

Source code

Pelican’s source code is hosted on GitHub. If you feel like hacking, take a look at Pelican’s internals.

Why the name “Pelican”?

“Pelican” is an anagram of calepin, which means “notebook” in French.

Release history

4.0.0 (2018-11-13)

• Replace develop_server.sh script with pelican --listen
• Improved copy/link behavior for large static files (e.g., videos)
• New {static} syntax to link to static content; content linked to by {static} and {attach} is automatically copied over even if not in STATIC_PATHS
• Pages can now have draft status
• Show current settings via new --print-settings flag
• All settings for slugs now use {slug} and/or {lang} rather than %s. If %s-style settings are encountered, Pelican will emit a warning and fallback to the default setting.
• New signals: feed_generated and page_generated_write_page
• Replace Fabric with Invoke and fabfile.py template with tasks.py
• Replace PAGINATED_DIRECT_TEMPLATES by PAGINATED_TEMPLATES, extending control over pagination to all templates and making page size variable
• Replace SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS (and friends) by SLUG_REGEX_SUBSTITUTIONS for more finegrained control
• '{base_name}' value in PAGINATION_PATTERNS setting no longer strips 'bar' from 'foo/bar.html' (unless 'bar' == 'index').
• ARTICLE_ORDER_BY and PAGE_ORDER_BY now also affect 1) category, tag and author pages 2) feeds 3) draft and hidden articles and pages
• New ARTICLE_TRANSLATION_ID and PAGE_TRANSLATION_ID settings to specify metadata attributes used to identify/disable translations
• Make the HTML reader parse multiple occurrences of metadata tags as a list
• New Blogger XML backup importer
• Wordpress importer now updates file links to point to local copies if the files were downloaded with --wp-attach.
• Importer no longer inserts extra newlines, to prevent breaking of HTML attributes.
• Pelican server now prioritises foo.html and foo/index.html over foo/ when resolving foo.

3.7.1 (2017-01-10)

• Fix locale issues in Quickstart script
• Specify encoding for README and CHANGELOG in setup.py

3.7.0 (2016-12-12)

• Atom feeds output <content> in addition to <summary>
• Atom feeds use <published> for the original publication date and <updated> for modifications
• Simplify Atom feed ID generation and support URL fragments
• Produce category feeds with category-specific titles
• RSS feeds now default to summary instead of full content; set RSS_FEED_SUMMARY_ONLY = False to revert to previous behavior
• Replace MD_EXTENSIONS with MARKDOWN setting
• Replace JINJA_EXTENSIONS with more-robust JINJA_ENVIRONMENT setting
• Improve summary truncation logic to handle special characters and tags that span multiple lines, using HTML parser instead of regular expressions
• Include summary when looking for intra-site link substitutions
• Link to authors and index via {author}name and {index} syntax
• Override widget names via LINKS_WIDGET_NAME and SOCIAL_WIDGET_NAME
• Add INDEX_SAVE_AS option to override default index.html value
• Remove PAGES context variable for themes in favor of pages
• SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS now accepts 3-tuple elements, allowing URL slugs to contain non-alphanumeric characters
• Tag and category slugs can be controlled with greater precision using the TAG_SUBSTITUTIONS and CATEGORY_SUBSTITUTIONS settings
• Author slugs can be controlled with greater precision using the AUTHOR_SUBSTITUTIONS setting
• DEFAULT_DATE can be defined as a string
• Use mtime instead of ctime when DEFAULT_DATE = 'fs'
• Add --fatal=errors|warnings option for use with continuous integration
• When using generator-level caching, ensure previously-cached files are processed instead of just new files.
• Add Python and Pelican version information to debug output
• Improve compatibility with Python 3.5
• Comply with and enforce PEP8 guidelines
• Replace tables in settings documentation with data:: directives

3.6.3 (2015-08-14)

• Fix permissions issue in release tarball

3.6.2 (2015-08-01)

• Fix installation errors related to Unicode in tests
• Don’t show pagination in notmyidea theme if there’s only one page
• Make hidden pages available in context
• Improve URLWrapper comparison

3.6.0 (2015-06-15)

• Disable caching by default in order to prevent potential confusion
• Improve caching behavior, replacing pickle with cpickle
• Allow Markdown or reST content in metadata fields other than summary
• Support semicolon-separated author/tag lists
• Improve flexibility of article sorting
• Add --relative-urls argument
• Support devserver listening on addresses other than localhost
• Unify HTTP server handlers to pelican.server throughout
• Handle intra-site links to draft posts
• Move tag_cloud from core to plugin
• Load default theme’s external resources via HTTPS
• Import drafts from WordPress XML
• Improve support for Windows users
• Enhance logging and test suite
• Clean up and refactor codebase
• New signals: all_generators_finalized and page_writer_finalized

3.5.0 (2014-11-04)

• Introduce ARTICLE_ORDER_BY and PAGE_ORDER_BY settings to control the order of articles and pages.
• Include time zone information in dates rendered in templates.
• Expose the reader name in the metadata for articles and pages.
• Add the ability to store static files along with content in the same directory as articles and pages using {attach} in the path.
• Prevent Pelican from raising an exception when there are duplicate pieces of metadata in a Markdown file.
• Introduce the TYPOGRIFY_IGNORE_TAGS setting to add HTML tags to be ignored by Typogrify.
• Add the ability to use - in date formats to strip leading zeros. For example, %-d/%-m/%y will now result in the date 9/8/12.
• Ensure feed generation is correctly disabled during quickstart configuration.
• Fix PAGE_EXCLUDES and ARTICLE_EXCLUDES from incorrectly matching sub-directories.
• Introduce STATIC_EXCLUDE setting to add static file excludes.
• Fix an issue when using PAGINATION_PATTERNS while RELATIVE_URLS is enabled.
• Fix feed generation causing links to use the wrong language for month names when using other locales.
• Fix an issue where the authors list in the simple template wasn’t correctly formatted.
• Fix an issue when parsing non-string URLs from settings.
• Improve consistency of debug and warning messages.

3.4.0 (2014-07-01)

• Speed up content generation via new caching mechanism
• Add selective post generation (instead of always building entire site)
• Many documentation improvements, including switching to prettier RtD theme
• Add support for multiple content and plugin paths
• Add :modified: metadata field to complement :date:. Used to specify the last date and time an article was updated independently from the date and time it was published.
• Add support for multiple authors via new :authors: metadata field
• Watch for changes in static directories when in auto-regeneration mode
• Add filters to limit log output when desired
• Add language support to drafts
• Add SLUGIFY_SOURCE setting to control how post slugs are generated
• Fix many issues relating to locale and encoding
• Apply Typogrify filter to post summary
• Preserve file metadata (e.g. time stamps) when copying static files to output
• Move AsciiDoc support from Pelican core into separate plugin
• Produce inline links instead of reference-style links when importing content
• Improve handling of IGNORE_FILES setting behavior
• Properly escape symbol characters in tag names (e.g., C++)
• Minor tweaks for Python 3.4 compatibility
• Add several new signals

3.3.0 (2013-09-24)

• Drop Python 3.2 support in favor of Python 3.3
• Add Fabfile so Fabric can be used for workflow automation instead of Make
• OUTPUT_RETENTION setting can be used to preserve metadata (e.g., VCS data such as .hg and .git) from being removed from output directory
• Tumblr import
• Improve logic and consistency when cleaning output folder
• Improve documentation versioning and release automation
• Improve pagination flexibility
• Rename signals for better consistency (some plugins may need to be updated)
• Move metadata extraction from generators to readers; metadata extraction no longer article-specific
• Deprecate FILES_TO_COPY in favor of STATIC_PATHS and EXTRA_PATH_METADATA
• Summaries in Markdown posts no longer include footnotes
• Remove unnecessary whitespace in output via lstrip_blocks Jinja parameter
• Move PDF generation from core to plugin
• Replace MARKUP setting with READERS
• Add warning if img tag is missing alt attribute
• Add support for {} in relative links syntax, besides ||
• Add support for {tag} and {category} relative links
• Add a content_written signal

3.2.1 and 3.2.2

• Facilitate inclusion in FreeBSD Ports Collection

3.2 (2013-04-24)

• Support for Python 3!
• Override page save-to location from meta-data (enables using a static page as the site’s home page, for example)
• Time period archives (per-year, per-month, and per-day archives of posts)
• Posterous blog import
• Improve WordPress blog import
• Migrate plugins to separate repository
• Improve HTML parser
• Provide ability to show or hide categories from menu using DISPLAY_CATEGORIES_ON_MENU option
• Auto-regeneration can be told to ignore files via IGNORE_FILES setting
• Improve post-generation feedback to user
• For multilingual posts, use meta-data to designate which is the original and which is the translation
• Add .mdown to list of supported Markdown file extensions
• Document-relative URL generation (RELATIVE_URLS) is now off by default

3.1 (2012-12-04)

• Importer now stores slugs within files by default. This can be disabled with the --disable-slugs option.
• Improve handling of links to intra-site resources
• Ensure WordPress import adds paragraphs for all types of line endings in post content
• Decode HTML entities within WordPress post titles on import
• Improve appearance of LinkedIn icon in default theme
• Add GitHub and Google+ social icons support in default theme
• Optimize social icons
• Add FEED_ALL_ATOM and FEED_ALL_RSS to generate feeds containing all posts regardless of their language
• Split TRANSLATION_FEED into TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM and TRANSLATION_FEED_RSS
• Different feeds can now be enabled/disabled individually
• Allow for blank author: if AUTHOR setting is not set, author won’t default to ${USER} anymore, and a post won’t contain any author information if the post author is empty
• Move LESS and Webassets support from Pelican core to plugin
• The DEFAULT_DATE setting now defaults to None, which means that articles won’t be generated unless date metadata is specified
• Add FILENAME_METADATA setting to support metadata extraction from filename
• Add gzip_cache plugin to compress common text files into a .gz file within the same directory as the original file, preventing the server (e.g. Nginx) from having to compress files during an HTTP call
• Add support for AsciiDoc-formatted content
• Add USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY setting so that feature can be toggled on/off
• Support arbitrary Jinja template files
• Restore basic functional tests
• New signals: generator_init, get_generators, and article_generate_preread

3.0 (2012-08-08)

• Refactored the way URLs are handled
• Improved the English documentation
• Fixed packaging using setuptools entrypoints
• Added typogrify support
• Added a way to disable feed generation
• Added support for DIRECT_TEMPLATES
• Allow multiple extensions for content files
• Added LESS support
• Improved the import script
• Added functional tests
• Rsync support in the generated Makefile
• Improved feed support (easily pluggable with Feedburner for instance)
• Added support for abbr in reST
• Fixed a bunch of bugs :-)

2.8 (2012-02-28)

• Dotclear importer
• Allow the usage of Markdown extensions
• Themes are now easily extensible
• Don’t output pagination information if there is only one page
• Add a page per author, with all their articles
• Improved the test suite
• Made the themes easier to extend
• Removed Skribit support
• Added a pelican-quickstart script
• Fixed timezone-related issues
• Added some scripts for Windows support
• Date can be specified in seconds
• Never fail when generating posts (skip and continue)
• Allow the use of future dates
• Support having different timezones per language
• Enhanced the documentation

2.7 (2011-06-11)

• Use logging rather than echoing to stdout
• Support custom Jinja filters
• Compatibility with Python 2.5
• Added a theme manager
• Packaged for Debian
• Added draft support

2.6 (2011-03-08)

• Changes in the output directory structure
• Makes templates easier to work with / create
• Added RSS support (was Atom-only)
• Added tag support for the feeds
• Enhance the documentation
• Added another theme (brownstone)
• Added translations
• Added a way to use cleaner URLs with a rewrite url module (or equivalent)
• Added a tag cloud
• Added an autoreloading feature: the blog is automatically regenerated each time a modification is detected
• Translate the documentation into French
• Import a blog from an RSS feed
• Pagination support
• Added Skribit support

2.5 (2010-11-20)

• Import from WordPress
• Added some new themes (martyalchin / wide-notmyidea)
• First bug report!
• Linkedin support
• Added a FAQ
• Google Analytics support
• Twitter support
• Use relative URLs, not static ones

2.4 (2010-11-06)

• Minor themes changes
• Add Disqus support (so we have comments)
• Another code refactoring
• Added config settings about pages
• Blog entries can also be generated in PDF

2.3 (2010-10-31)

• Markdown support

2.2 (2010-10-30)

• Prettify output
• Manages static pages as well

2.1 (2010-10-30)

• Make notmyidea the default theme

2.0 (2010-10-30)

• Refactoring to be more extensible
• Change into the setting variables

1.2 (2010-09-28)

• Added a debug option
• Added per-category feeds
• Use filesystem to get dates if no metadata is provided
• Add Pygments support

1.1 (2010-08-19)

• First working version