As of 1 minute ago, Niko­la github mas­ter's "in­stal­l_the­me" com­mand pulls themes from http://themes.niko­la.ralsi­na.me

So, sud­den­ly, in­stead of 2 themes for down­load, you have ~65 (although of course, most of them are bootswatch vari­a­tions in 2 themes, jin­ja-de­fault looks ex­act­ly like de­fault, and or­phan is use­less ;-)

And you can con­trib­ute themes now!

How?

1. Give me a pull re­quest at http­s://github.­­com/get­niko­la/niko­la-themes

   All you have to do is add your theme in themes/ and pull re­quest.

2. Send me a zip of your theme and I'll do it.

Con­tribut­ing themes will take a while be­cause the theme has to be ex­am­ined for ma­li­cious code in the tem­plates, but I will process them, slow­ly but sure­ly. If you have sent me a theme in the past and I have not done it, I am ter­ri­bly sor­ry and hope you can find it in you to try one more time :-)

The themes site it­self is not ex­act­ly awe­some, but it is func­tion­al, and you can get themes from there too, and see de­mo sites for each the­me, and even look at au­to­gen­er­at­ed screen­shots (which sad­ly don't show web­fonts)

I had this is­sue open in the bug track­er for Niko­la (my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor) for a long time: "Add minc­ss sup­port­".

Well, no, it does­n't have it yet, but I did some re­search on whether it would be worth adding. And boy, minc­ss im­pressed the heck out of me.

You see, Niko­la's themes tend to use unadul­tered boot­strap, which means they car­ry a large num­ber of things that are not used in their CSS. Be­sides, it us­es sev­er­al stylesheets from do­cu­til­s, pyg­ments, and more.

What minc­ss does is ex­am­ine your HTML and your CSS, and re­move all the un­used CSS. So, I wrote a script that ex­am­ines the Niko­la out­put and over­writes the CSS files with the min­i­mal things that are ac­tu­al­ly need­ed there.

And the re­sult?

Here is the be­fore/after for each CSS file in Niko­la's de­mo site:

bootstrap-responsive.min.css  16849  3251
bootstrap.min.css            106059 14737
code.css                       3670  2114
colorbox.css                   6457   774
rst.css                        6559  2581
theme.css                      1287  1061
-----------------------------------------
                             140881 24518

But wait, Niko­la sup­ports bundling all those files in­to a sin­gle large CSS file to avoid net­work re­quests (us­ing we­bas­sets). Does it work in that case too?

Well yes:

all-nocdn.css                167457 29496

But that is not al­l. The minc­ss files are not mini­fied. Pass­ing al­l-nocd­n.c­ss through Yui-­com­pres­sor shrinks it fur­ther to 20599 bytes. Which, gzipped, is a pal­try 4801 bytes. That means the com­plete styling of the whole site is a sin­gle CSS file less than 5KB in size.

That, is im­pres­sive.

Over a year ago (time flies!) I post­ed some­thing about a project called Al­va. Let me quote my­self:

Al­va is al­most the op­po­site of Niko­la. If Niko­la is about mak­ing stat­ic sites, Al­va is a dy­nam­ic site. How­ev­er, as Hegel sug­gest­s, from the the­sis and the an­tithe­sis comes the syn­the­sis.

So, Al­va is about dy­nam­i­cal­ly cre­at­ing stat­ic sites. If you want to have Niko­la in your serv­er in­stead of in your own com­put­er, and have the con­ve­nience of an on­line tool, that's the niche Al­va tries to fil­l.

So, you would in­stall Al­va, and use it like any oth­er we­b-based blog­ging tool. Yet, be­hind the sce­nes, you would have Niko­la, and all the per­for­mance and se­cu­ri­ty ben­e­fits of stat­ic sites.

And maybe some­day, I (or some­one) will put up a mul­ti­-us­er ver­sion of Al­va, and you will be able to get host­ed blogs, know­ing all the da­ta is yours and you can leave any­time and do your own thing.

The ap­proach I was tak­ing at the time proved to be un­suc­cess­ful, and there were a few oth­er fail­ures along the way. Of course, the prob­lem was in how I was ap­proach­ing the task. So I did the right thing, and learned how to do it "right".

Still not us­able, still not host­ed any­where, but al­ready semi-­func­tion­al: Al­va lives now

There's a lot of work still to be done. But I now know how to do it. To pre­vent the usu­al ar­gu­ments, here is a lit­tle ex­pla­na­tion of mo­ti­va­tion, tool­ing, etc.

I am a very big pro­po­nent of stat­ic site gen­er­a­tors. I would not have both­ered writ­ing Niko­la oth­er­wise. But there is al­ways that feel­ing that maybe there is some lit­tle thing which is hard to im­ple­men­t, like a con­tact for­m.

And let's face it, the eas­i­est way to solve some of those things is by stick­ing a few lines of PHP in your HTM­L.

So, if you re­al­ly want to, you can do it. I think Niko­la (github mas­ter) is the first stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor that sup­ports php code. Here's how:

1. Add php to your page_­com­pil­ers (be­cause I will nev­er put it there by de­fault­):

   post_compilers = {
       "rest": ('.txt', '.rst'),
       "markdown": ('.md', '.mdown', '.markdown'),
       "textile": ('.textile',),
       "txt2tags": ('.t2t',),
       "bbcode": ('.bb',),
       "wiki": ('.wiki',),
       "ipynb": ('.ipynb',),
       "html": ('.html', '.htm'),
       "php": ('.php'),
   }

2. Add php posts or pages to your post_­pages:

   post_pages = (
       ("posts/*.txt", "posts", "post.tmpl", True),
       ("posts/*.php", "posts", "post.tmpl", True),
       ("stories/*.txt", "stories", "story.tmpl", False),
       ("stories/*.php", "stories", "story.tmpl", False),
   )

3. Cre­ate a php post:

   nikola new_post posts/foo.php

4. Put php in there:

   <!--
   .. date: 2013/04/16 09:57:09
   .. title: php test
   .. slug: foo
   -->
   
   <?php
   Print "Hello, World!";
   ?>

Build the site as usu­al, and you should end up with a page with PHP ex­ten­sion, that has that PHP in the "con­tent" area, so it will fol­low your site's theme. Of course you can't do things like add HTTP head­ers and such, but hey, read the ti­tle.

Yes, ver­sion 5.4.4 of Niko­la, my stat­ic site/blog gen­er­a­tor is just pub­lished at the usu­al place, in­clud­ing the fol­low­ing im­prove­ments: