How Is Pelican?

June 28, 2014

I’m sort of jazzed about static site generators right now for some reason. And since I needed to build a developer blog at Key Ingredient, it seemed like a good opportunity. After checking out Jekyll, Hakyll, Hyde Nikola and Pelican I ended up picking Pelican.

I considered Jekyll because it’s got a lot of buzz around it right now which does count for something. Many times buzz equals users which equals features added more quickly. However, I really wanted something in Python in case I ever needed to hack on it(Ruby is not my favorite). Hakyll was also out for the same reason.

So that leaves Hyde, Nikola and Pelican. The Hyde project seems poorly managed with the old site lying around. Also there hasn’t been much progress on the project in a while. Nikola seems great! The documentation is good and it seems mature. For whatever reason it just didn’t click with me.

That leaves Pelican. Pelican just makes sense to me. The quickstart script, multiple build options, and config setting seem like something I would write for myself if I were so inclined. I really like the fact that I can write in markdown, restructured text, or asciidoc even though I’ll stick mostly with markdown since I’m used to it(github and Unfuddle also use markdown). I also like the fact that Pelican uses Jinja for theme templates because we use it for the templates on keyingredient.com.

For the dev blog, I started with the Bootstrap 2 Pelican theme, upgraded it to Bootstrap 3 and added our logo. Here’s the result: …and the code.

Once the Key Ingredient developer blog was up and running I turned my attention to this site. Fattuba had been languishing for years and my boss Harlan gave me the push I needed to overhaul the thing already!