Zola 0.23

#technology #zola

After a small blogging hiatus, it seemed time to check up on my sites to see how they were doing.

First question: do they still build?

Turns out the answer was no.

I currently maintain both a Zola and a Hugo site.

The Hugo site being broken was not surprising to me. That's most of the reason I moved towards Zola as a (hopefully) more stable alternative.

Zola - being somewhat newer to me - was still under long-term evaluation.

As it happens, the 0.23.0 release introduced some great changes, such as moving from Tera v1 to v2. Unfortunately, this is not quite backwards compatible with many themes built on Tera v1.

In fact, in addition to the theme I was previously using, several of the themes I quickly tested from the Zola Themes catalogue were not working / required updates.

The migration steps do provide a good guide - however - the changes are significant enough, with e.g. macros being dropped, that I decided to just roll my own - based on the latest and greatest docs.

This was actually pretty easy to do; I dropped a lot of stuff I inherited from using a public theme and was able to simplify down to just the below:

themes/minimal/
├── sass
│   └── style.scss
├── templates
│   ├── archive.html
│   ├── base.html
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── page.html
│   ├── section.html
│   ├── taxonomy_list.html
│   └── taxonomy_single.html
└── theme.toml

The site's still got all the basics I require:

  • RSS feeds
  • pages and posts
  • tags

And the lightweight theme has:

  • monospaced fonts!
  • dark/light theme
  • no JavaScript
  • no external dependencies

Very lightweight, and easy to maintain going forwards.

Fingers crossed that future updates require less manual intervention, but I guess at the end of the day that's half of the fun :)