I am using awesome minimal-mistake-jekyll theme from https://www.jekyllthemes.io/theme/10267810/minimal-mistakes and I am bit confused about latest gem version 4.5.1.
Is it building my website right out of the box (git push) or is it complaining about not whitelisted plugins?
Another noob question: Using gemified version 4.5.1 makes my plugins in _config.yml file (plugins:
jekyll-paginate
jekyll-sitemap
jekyll-gist
jekyll-feed
jemoji
obsolete?
Thank you very much Mr. Rose for your awesome theme!
You have to use the “fork method” where the theme’s _layouts, _includes, _sass, and assets folders and files are in the repo being pushed up to GitHub.
Those plugins you mentioned above are all whitelisted and loaded automatically by GitHub pages. So they should all work.
When you’re testing locally you should have your Gemfile setup as per GH’s instructions. Essentially you swap gem 'jekyll' and all the plugins with gem 'github-pages', group: :jekyll_plugins.
Like any other 3rd party Jekyll theme used on GitHub Pages, there’s no easy or clean way to upgrade. You’ll have to pull down theme updates via Git and deal with merge conflicts that might occur if you’ve modified any files.
If MM ever gets whitelisted by GitHub it’ll be as simple as gem update minimal-mistakes-jekyll to upgrade.
Thank you very much for your quick answer. I really hope github is listening and white-listing your theme. It would be a huge boost, because old “fork method” really sucks.
@mmistakes Why don’t you point your users to other free hosting solutions as Netlify or GitLab pages that don’t have the restrictions GitHub Pages have?
I never noticed an external plugin ou theme accepted by GitHub and even if we all agree your theme deserves it, I think GitHub sticks to his original mission and aims at free small websites for open-source software, not good looking personal websites.
I think a tutorial which shows how you can connect your GitHub repo to e.g. Netlify and host your jekyll-powered website with your theme will save a lot of headache to your users.
When I have the chance I do point out other services and CI’s that support 3rd party gems. I’ve noticed most people using my theme tend to be new to web development and want to use GH Pages just because they read some tutorial on hosting their site for free there.
As more people become aware of the alternatives it shouldn’t be that big of an issue. Just hard to get the word out because everyone just looks at GitHub Pages as the only solution.
I very much agree with @mmistakes, that most people come to these themes when they are fresh to the industry and just want to get rolling on GitHub Pages and move onto the next thing.
However I do like the idea of pushing alternative routes that may be more catered to open source theme gems, and may even be easier to setup. I’ve been working on my themes with the mindset that they could be used in a variety of ways - such as a gem, a fork, an installation on Siteleaf and so on.
I’d like to add Netlify, GitLab Pages, CloudCannon and a few others if I can. As long as it meant I don’t have to litter my theme / repo with special configuration files.
Disclaimer: I have no relation what so ever with Netlify, I’m just a very satisfied user and I think it’s a game changer in static website hosting on top of GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket.
If you haven’t tested it yet, I can only encourage you to test hosting your theme on Netlify, it shouldn’t be much overhead, as you just have to link your source repo and provide your custom build command. Curious about your feedback here.
I have to admit I did not even consider an alternative to GitHub Pages, because I simply never read about one. Thanks very much Frank for giving heads up on alternatives . I will give Netlify a shot.
I don’t think I’ll be hosting the demo theme on there, as the setup I have means that I can test for GH pages users as well as theme gem users. I will however test my theme gem on Netlify with a test repo. It’ll be nice to provide a wide selection of hosting and CMS integration options when using my theme .
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