See latest changes in changelog.md

Fundamental is a clean, fully responsive, lightweight Jekyll theme for blogging. No frameworks. It uses system fonts, so no external stylesheets are loaded. The CSS is just 2Kb gzipped.

View the demo here.

Features

  • Tag support
  • Archive support
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Editable color palette via: (_variables.scss)
  • Automatic header navigation
  • Syntax highlighting
  • Social Buttons
  • Bio Section
  • Pagination *new (please rename index.md to index.html, see changelog.md) for more information.

Installation

Via Direct Download:

Download or clone the fundamental-blank repository. All you have to do from here is run bundle install and then bundle update. You're good to go!

Or...

Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "fundamental"

And add this line to your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

theme: fundamental

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install fundamental

Usage

Getting Started

After installing you should have a config.yml file in your base directory. Copy the contents of the repo config.yml into your own config file. This will supply you with all the required configurations. You can edit them from here.

Jekyll gives you an index.md file as your homepage. Copy this into it to get started, the front matter will be explained below: !! Something to note, Fundamental does not currently support categories (they're coming!). The default page Jekyll produces will break breadcrumbs (for now).

!! Change the index.md extension to .html to allow pagination to work.

---
layout: home
title: Home
---

If you want to add the 'Archive' file you see in the demo. Create an /archive directory in your base directory. Then create an index.md inside it. Ensure it has the layout: site-archive. This layout displays all the posts in the site.

Plugins

Fundamemtal uses these plugins. When you have installed the Fundamental gem, run bundle install to install the required plugins. They can be turned on and off in your configuration file.

  1. jekyll-feed
  2. jekyll-archives
  3. jekyll-seo-tag
  4. jekyll-paginate

The top navigation loops through the sites pages that have menu: true in the front matter. This makes it easy to add new pages to your site. You can also order the pages by setting the value of order.

For instance: order: 2 will place this item second (to the right of the first item).

The homepage is linked in the naviagtion statically by default. It can't be removed.

Config

The usual configuration settings can be found at the top of config.yml.

You can turn the themes components off and on by setting these to true or false. These are fairly self explanatory, the social ones can also be turned on or off independently.

enabled:
  breadcrumbs: true
  tags: true
  # Enable RSS menu item
  rss: false
  seo: true
  # Share buttons are only on desktop (user use the share menu on mobile).
  social:
    enabled: true
    twitter: true
    facebook: true
    messenger: true
    whatsapp: true
Bio Section

You can copy this code into your config.yml file. enabled can be set to either true or false (as per plugins). You can then edit the fields how you like. The img_url can be linked to any image, locally or remote, false === a default icon which inherits the colour from socialBtnsColor.

bio:
    enabled: true
    heading: 'Your bio title'
    subheading: 'Your bio subheading'
    img_url: false #put a url to an image in here or use the icon with false.
    body: >
      In this blog I'm documenting my ever evolving knowledge in
      making things for the web. I'll touch on topics like UI, UX,
      JavaScript, CSS and any other technologies I come across.

This appears as a slide out menu from a fixed circular icon in the bottom right corner.

Layouts

For blog posts use the post layout (this is already set as default via config file, unless changed.) For normal pages use the page layout. Naturally, the home layout is used for the home page which is where the post-loop (blog) lives. All of these layouts inherit from the default layout, which contains the head and footer includes.

The other layouts are for the jekyll-archives plugin.

File Structure
  ├── _layouts
  │   ├── archive.html
  │   ├── default.html
|   ├── home.html
  │   ├── month.html
  │   ├── page.html
  │   ├── post.html
  |   ├── site-archive.html
  │   └── tag_page.html

Includes

The includes are fairly self explanatory aside from info/item. info.html is the post information include in the post layout. Item is the blog item that gets outputted on the homepage. tag-cloud.html is the recurrent tag list you see on the homepage/throughout the sites pages. There's a few svg includes as well that are just buttons/icons. ######File structure

├── _includes
│   ├── bio.html
│   ├── bio.svg
│   ├── breadcrumbs.html
│   ├── comments.html
│   ├── facebook.svg
│   ├── footer.html
│   ├── head.html
│   ├── header.html
│   ├── info.html
│   ├── item.html
│   ├── messenger.svg
│   ├── share.html
│   ├── tag-cloud.html
│   ├── twitter.svg
│   └── whatsapp.svg

Sass

Sass is split into logical sections. The main.scss file is in /assets/. To overwrite these files, add one with the equivalent name to your _sass directory (make one if it doesn't already exist). Jekyll will look in here before defaulting back to the theme files.

Sass Folder Structure
  ├── _sass
  │   ├── _blog.scss
  │   ├── _footer.scss
  │   ├── _fundamentals.scss
  │   ├── _globals.scss
  │   ├── _header.scss
  │   ├── _post.scss
  │   ├── _syntax.scss
  │   ├── _tables.scss
  │   ├── _typography.scss
  │   └── _variables.scss
Variables

The first file to customise would be _variables.scss, you're probably best copying it from the repo and editing it. You can overwrite any of these variables with your own. There are four palette variables:

  • $base: #f5f2f2; - the body background colour.
  • $textColor: #444;
  • $accent: #4845DF; - the purple colour
  • $tertiary: lighten($accent, 5%); - lighter version of accent

$font uses a system font stack. Change this to whatever you wish. $font: -apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI",Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,"Helvetica Neue",sans-serif;

TODO: Separate palette from other variables. For easier custom colours.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

More Screenshots

Blog Post

404 Page

You can get this 404 page from the repo to use in your site. Just copy it into your main directory.

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