Community Plugin

@lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog

Typography driven, feature-rich blogging theme with minimal aesthetics. Includes tags/categories support and extensive features for code blocks such as live preview, line numbers, and line highlighting.

Read the Source Code.

Also be sure to checkout other Free & Open Source Gatsby Themes

Features

MDX
Theme UI-based theming
Light Mode / Dark Mode
Typography driven, minimal style
Tags/Categories support
Code highlighting with prism-react-renderer and react-live support. Also allows adding line numbers, line highlighting, language tabs, and file titles.
RSS Feed for blog posts

Installation

npm install @lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog

Install as a starter

This will generate a new site that pre-configures use of the theme.

gatsby new minimal-blog LekoArts/gatsby-starter-minimal-blog

View the starter’s code

Usage

Theme options

Key	Default Value	Description
`basePath`	`/`	Root url for the theme
`blogPath`	`/blog`	url for the blog post overview page
`tagsPath`	`/tags`	url for the tags overview page and prefix for tags (e.g. `/tags/my-tag`)
`postsPath`	`content/posts`	Location of posts
`postsPrefix`	`/`	Prefix for all individual blog posts
`pagesPath`	`content/pages`	Location of additional pages (optional)
`mdx`	`true`	Configure `gatsby-plugin-mdx` (if your website already is using the plugin pass `false` to turn this off)
`formatString`	`DD.MM.YYYY`	Configure the date format for Date fields
`showLineNumbers`	`true`	Show line numbers in code blocks
`showCopyButton`	`true`	Show copy button in code blocks
`navigation`	`[]`	Add links to your internal sites to the left part of the header
`externalLinks`	`[]`	Add links to your external sites to the right part of the header
`feed`	`true`	Configure `gatsby-plugin-feed` (if your website already is using the plugin pass `false` to turn this off)
`feedTitle`	`Minimal Blog - @lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog`	Pass a string to the `title` option of `gatsby-plugin-feed`

Example usage

// gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `@lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog`,
      options: {
        showLineNumbers: false,
        navigation: [
          {
            title: `Blog`,
            slug: `/blog`,
          },
          {
            title: `About`,
            slug: `/about`,
          },
        ],
        externalLinks: [
          {
            name: `Twitter`,
            url: `https://twitter.com/lekoarts_de`,
          },
          {
            name: `Instagram`,
            url: `https://www.instagram.com/lekoarts.de/`,
          },
        ],
      },
    },
  ],
};

Additional configuration

In addition to the theme options, there are a handful of items you can customize via the siteMetadata object in your site’s gatsby-config.js

// gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  siteMetadata: {
    // Used for the title template on pages other than the index site
    siteTitle: `Lupin`,
    // Default title of the page
    siteTitleAlt: `Minimal Blog - @lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog`,
    // Can be used for e.g. JSONLD
    siteHeadline: `Minimal Blog - Gatsby Theme from @lekoarts`,
    // Will be used to generate absolute URLs for og:image etc.
    siteUrl: `https://minimal-blog.lekoarts.de`,
    // Used for SEO
    siteDescription: `Typography driven, feature-rich blogging theme with minimal aesthetics. Includes tags/categories support and extensive features for code blocks such as live preview, line numbers, and line highlighting.`,
    // Will be set on the <html /> tag
    siteLanguage: `en`,
    // Used for og:image and must be placed inside the `static` folder
    siteImage: `/banner.jpg`,
    // Twitter Handle
    author: `@lekoarts_de`,
  },
};

If you want to add additional items to the navigation or external links (left and right side of header), add objects in the shape shown above to the arrays.

Code Highlighting

Since this theme ships with prism-react-renderer and react-live certain additional features were added to code blocks. You can find an overview / usage example in the example repository! If you want to change certain code styles or add additional language tabs, you need to shadow the file src/@lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog/styles/code.js.

Language tabs:

When you add a language (such as e.g. js or javascript) to the code block, a little tab will appear at the top left corner.

```js
// code goes here
```

Code titles:

You can display a title (e.g. the file path) above the code block.

```jsx:title=your-title
// code goes here
```

Or without a specific language:

```:title=your-title
// code goes here
```

Line highlighting:

You can highlight single or multiple (or both) lines in a code block. You need to add a language.

```js {2,4-5}
const test = 3
const foo = 'bar'
const harry = 'potter'
const hermione = 'granger'
const ron = 'weasley'
```

Hide line numbers:

If you want to hide line numbers you can either globally disable them (see Theme options) or on a block-by-block basis. You can also combine that with the other attributes.

```noLineNumbers
// code goes here
```

react-live:

Add react-live to the code block (and render the component) to see a preview below it.

```js react-live
const onClick = () => {
  alert("You opened me");
};
render(<button onClick={onClick}>Alohomora!</button>);
```

Shadowing

Please read the guide Shadowing in Gatsby Themes to understand how to customize the this theme! Generally speaking you will want to place your files into src/@lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog/ to shadow/override files.

Adding content

Adding a new blog post

New blog posts will be shown on the index page (the three most recent ones) of this theme and on the blog overview page. They can be added by creating MDX files inside content/posts. General setup:

Create a new folder inside content/posts
Create a new index.mdx file, and add the frontmatter
Add images to the created folder (from step 1) you want to reference in your blog post
Reference an image as your banner in the frontmatter
Write your content below the frontmatter
Add a slug to the frontmatter to use a custom slug, e.g. slug: "/my-slug" (Optional)

Frontmatter reference:

---
title: Introduction to "Defence against the Dark Arts"
date: 2019-11-07
description: Defence Against the Dark Arts (abbreviated as DADA) is a subject taught at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
tags:
  - Tutorial
  - Dark Arts
banner: ./defence-against-the-dark-arts.jpg
canonicalUrl: https://random-blog-about-curses.com/curses-counter-curses-and-more
---

The fields description, banner and canonicalUrl are optional! If no description is provided, an excerpt of the blog post will be used. If no banner is provided, the default siteImage (from siteMetadata) is used. If no canonicalUrl is provided, it will not be included in the header.

The date field has to be written in the format YYYY-MM-DD!

Adding a new page

Additional pages can be created by placing MDX files inside contents/pages, e.g. an “About” or “Contact” page. You’ll manually need to link to those pages, for example by adding them to the navigation (in siteMetadata). General instructions:

Create a new folder inside content/pages
Create a new index.mdx file, and add the frontmatter
Write your content below the frontmatter
Optionally add files/images to the folder you want to reference from the page

Frontmatter reference:

---
title: About
slug: "/about"
---

Changing the “Hero” text

To edit the hero text (“Hi, I’m Lupin…), create a file at src/@lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog/texts/hero.mdx to edit the text.

Changing the “Projects” part

To edit the projects part below “Latest posts”, create a file at src/@lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog/texts/bottom.mdx to edit the contents.

🌟 Supporting me

Thanks for using this project! I’m always interested in seeing what people do with my projects, so don’t hesitate to tag me on Twitter and share the project with me.

Please star this project, share it on Social Media or consider supporting me on Patreon or GitHub Sponsor!