How to convert a Jekyll theme to Octopress theme

Question

I started fiddling with Octopress recently, and I found a theme for Jekyll that I liked it.

The problem is that this theme doesn't have a similar structure that Octopress needs for themes.

I tried to clone the repo directly into my Octopress folder then use rake install['name-of-theme'] but that didn't work and I just got some errors about missing folders (source, sass).

So my question(s) is, how to install a theme for Jekyll with Octopress? is there a directory structure I need to follow? what are the minimum files requires to make it work?

I Googled a little bit but I didn't find anything related to converting a Jekyll theme.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can't. The author of Octopress made his own theme layout and plugins to support it. Jekyll is meant for you to create your own theme layout as you wish (it's barebones). Think of Jekyll as a great framework to write your own static site, a store front or a wiki or a blog - from scratch. Octopress, on the other hand though, adds a framework on top of Jekyll: theme layout, a number of plugins defaulted for a blog site, SEO throughout the templates, a config file for controlling this framework-on-top-of-a-framework (Octopress framework on top of Jekyll framework). Basically, you can take Jekyll and write your own theme layout any way you wish; but with Octopress, you already have a strict theme layout to adhere to.

Octopress' rake install[] command to install a theme just copies a bunch of files to specific directories, following the authors specific theme format.

He's also changing the format from time to time as well, which usually breaks even older Octopress themes working on current Octopress sites (doesn't seem to worry about backwards compatibility). I know: I really tried some old responsive ones I found only to get errors with the latest Octopress as of April 2014.

Anyhoot, after many tries, I finally just sat down and copy-n-pasted the HTML into a new Octopress theme manually myself. Created my own "theme" to try to get some older Octopress themes working.

Still didn't like it as it was buggy (and I was trying several older Octopress themes); so, I gave up and just wrote my own Octopress theme from scratch and moved on. Personally, I don't like how Octopress' layout is, well, laid out. Far too many freakin incremental files. I basically just built my own from scratch and skipped several of the "custom" stuff. This allowed me the freedom of mocking up my own raw responsive set of HTML files and organize it how I wish (http://eduncan911.com).

I understand why he added the custom stuff in the last few months: for people that don't know much about frontend or just wanted a quick place to tweak this font, change that color, or just add a JS script to the custom footer and be done with a plugin.

Me? I already had a full HTML/JSS responsive HTML mockup I wanted to use. I only needed to utilitze Octopress' articles and show/hide the pagenation and comments. I didn't need that elaborate Octopress template layout. Though, now if anyone wants my theme, they can only copy exactly what I did and will need to modify it as they want. I did keep the SCSS generation though, as I like SCSS.

https://github.com/eduncan911/eduncan911.github.io/tree/source