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 check out other Free & Open Source Gatsby Themes and my Personal Website.

Features

• MDX
• Theme UI-based theming
• Light Mode / Dark Mode
• Typography driven, minimal style
• Tags/Categories support
• Code highlighting with prism-react-renderer. 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 the theme including example content and additional plugins.

npx gatsby new gatsby-starter-minimal-blog https://github.com/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) | | sharp | true | Configure gatsby-plugin-sharp (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 | false | Show line numbers in code blocks. This can also be enabled on a block-by-block basis (see "Code Highlighting") | | 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 |

Example usage

// gatsby-config.mjs
const config = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `@lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog`,
      options: {
        showLineNumbers: true,
        navigation: [
          {
            title: `Blog`,
            slug: `/blog`,
          },
          {
            title: `About`,
            slug: `/about`,
          },
        ],
        externalLinks: [
          {
            name: `Twitter`,
            url: `https://twitter.com/lekoarts_de`,
          },
          {
            name: `Homepage`,
            url: `https://www.lekoarts.de`,
          },
        ],
      },
    },
  ],
};

export default config;

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.mjs

// gatsby-config.mjs
const config = {
  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.`,
    // Used for og:image and must be placed inside the `static` folder
    siteImage: `/banner.jpg`,
    // Set the default "lang" attribute on "html" element
    siteLanguage: `en`,
    // Twitter Handle
    author: `@lekoarts_de`,
  },
};

export default config;

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 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:

```none 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 highlight=2,4-5
const test = 3
const foo = 'bar'
const harry = 'potter'
const hermione = 'granger'
const ron = 'weasley'
```

Show line numbers:

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

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

Shadowing

Please read the guide Shadowing in Gatsby Themes to understand how to customize the 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:

1. Create a new folder inside content/posts
2. Create a new index.mdx file, and add the frontmatter
3. Add images to the created folder (from step 1) you want to reference in your blog post
4. Reference an image as your banner in the frontmatter
5. Write your content below the frontmatter
6. Add a slug to the frontmatter to use a custom slug, e.g. slug: "/my-slug" (Optional)
7. Use defer to opt-in into Deferred Static Generation (DSG) (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.
defer: false
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, defer 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:

1. Create a new folder inside content/pages
2. Create a new index.mdx file, and add the frontmatter
3. Write your content below the frontmatter
4. Optionally add files/images to the folder you want to reference from the page
5. Use defer to opt-in into Deferred Static Generation (DSG) (optional)

Frontmatter reference:

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

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.

Extending the footer of the post

Inside the <Post /> component there's also a <PostFooter /> component that you can shadow to display elements between the end of the post and the global footer. By default it returns null. Create a file at src/@lekoarts/gatsby-theme-minimal-blog/components/post-footer.jsx to edit this section. The <PostFooter /> component receives the complete post prop that <Post /> also receives.

Changelog

You can find the extensive changelog of changes on GitHub. You'll be able to see each patch, minor, and major changes and what pull requests contributed to them.

Questions?

If you have general questions or need help with Gatsby, please go to one of the support platforms mentioned in Gatsby's documentation. If you have a specific question about this theme, you can head to the GitHub Discussions of the repository.

🌟 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.

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