Does official pelican wiki use sphinx for generating? Can I use furo theme on pelican?

[jodusan]

Why does pelican official website use sphinx with furo underneath? (can i run furo somehow for pelican?) Why not pelican? I thought I will get pelican default ui when I set it up but instead i get some other theme 🤡

[justinmayer]

Hi Dušan. Welcome. I’d like to help answer your questions, but I’m having a bit of trouble understanding them. For example…

Why does pelican official website use sphinx with furo underneath?

It doesn’t, assuming you are referring to the getpelican.com web site. As far as I know, the only place that Sphinx + Furo is used is the documentation displayed at docs.getpelican.com.

can i run furo somehow for pelican?

Furo is a Sphinx theme, and as far as I am aware, Furo is not available as a Pelican theme.

Why not pelican? I thought I will get pelican default ui when I set it up but instead i get this

I do not understand this. The getpelican.com web site is generated with Pelican. Perhaps make your expectations more explicit?

If I had to take a guess, maybe your expectation is that the default theme when generating a site with Pelican would look like the getpelican.com web site. It does not.

[jodusan]

Hi Justin.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions and for the warm welcome.

I initially assumed that the official Pelican website, including the documentation at docs.getpelican.com, would be built using Pelican itself. Given how appealing the Furo theme is, I found it a bit surprising and somewhat misleading to see Sphinx and Furo being used instead. I understand that Sphinx and Pelican serve different purposes, but I had expected the documentation site to reflect Pelican's default styling.

I truly appreciate all the hard work that goes into the Pelican project and wish you continued success. Perhaps using Pelican for the documentation site in the future could help align user expectations even more closely.

[justinmayer]

Thank you for the kind words. From Pelican's inception, Sphinx has been used to generate Pelican's documentation, as presumably Sphinx had features at that time that Pelican did not yet have. While I do not have the time to completely rebuild Pelican's documentation in order to generate the docs from Pelican itself, proposals and implementations to that effect are welcome.

Also, regarding “user expectations”, I think it's worth pointing out that your expectations may or may not be representative of the general user base. This is the first time such a misunderstanding has arisen in the 10+ years Pelican has existed. Similarly, the use of the word “misleading” does not feel very good for me, particularly since we give ample credit and attribution to Furo, linked from the main Pelican site footer, on our Gratitude page. But I understand that you were confused, and perhaps there could be a way to reduce that confusion.

All that said, you have been very gracious and I can tell that you come with the best of intentions. I think it is also worth pointing out that there are a great number of attractive themes available for Pelican, and there is no reason for anyone to stick with the current default, which by the way in the near future we hope to replace with something more modern and attractive.