I can't figure out how Pelican is supposed to work

[mbridon]

I have an existing website built with Jekyll, and served on gitlab.freedesktop.org, the source code being here.

I only installed pelican[markdown], and didn't do much more.

When I run pelican --autoreload --listen --debug, I get the default page, but I can't find any of my pages, even though I moved them all in the content/ folder.

I have my own content/index.md, but that's not what I see in my browser, instead I see what seems to be the default Pelican index. 😕

I probably missed something at some point, but I can't find what. 🤔

What I really find puzzling is that I already have a Pelican-based website (my own: https://mathieu.daitauha.fr) and I don't remember having ever struggled so much. 😕

You can find my current experiments in the pelican branch on https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/cangjie/cangjie.pages.freedesktop.org/.

[justinmayer]

Hi @mbridon. I suspect the reason you are struggling in this case and not with your other Pelican-powered web site is because in this case you are migrating from Jekyll. If I were you, I would change my approach a bit and start by generating a fresh project using pelican-quickstart, and then slowly migrate your formerly-Jekyll-powered site over to the new project, one piece at a time. But perhaps that's precisely what you have already done.

In any case, it seems you are expecting Pelican to mirror your content and output directories, but that is not how Pelican operates by default. Pelican allows you to have completely separate source/destination hierarchies, and thus there is no one-to-one relationship between the two unless you configure Pelican to behave that way. See also: https://docs.getpelican.com/en/latest/faq.html#how-do-i-make-my-output-folder-structure-identical-to-my-content-hierarchy

I have my own content/index.md, but that's not what I see in my browser, instead I see what seems to be the default Pelican index.

That is the anticipated behavior, because you (1) are putting a static page outside the default content/pages/ hierarchy, and (2) you are trying to use a static page in place of the article index page. See also: https://docs.getpelican.com/en/latest/faq.html#how-can-i-use-a-static-page-as-my-home-page

If you don't have any chronological content (e.g., blog articles), I would start by moving everything in content/ to content/pages/ and see what happens.

Those are just some initial comments based on a cursory examination of your project. Hope it helps!

[mbridon]

Right, I indeed don't have any blog-like content... yet, but who knows 🤷

So, content/pages., let me try that... 😉

[mbridon]

Ok, indeed content/pages/ changed everything 😊

Now I have the list of pages twice on the index page 🤣

[justinmayer]

The list at the top looks like the “menu” (navigation) bar is being populated with all your pages, which is the default behavior for Pelican: https://docs.getpelican.com/en/latest/settings.html#DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU

[mbridon]

Thank you, now I'm searching how to not have all pages listed at the bottom of the page 😕

On my other Pelican-powered website, I have a home page as well as other pages accessible from it.

I pushed a copy of the git repo for my website on gitlab.com: https://gitlab.com/mbridon/mathieu.daitauha.fr

This way you can have a quick look at it and tell me how I actually managed to do that, because I can't actually remember 😢 (in 2020 I caught a bad flu which attacked my brain and spinal chord, leaving me paraplegic with cognitive issues and a terrible memory 😭), so I'd have to reverse-engineer how this thing even works, which I'll try do as time permits but any tip would help greatly. Just don't spend too much time on this though, I don't want to hog all your time. 😉

[justinmayer]

I'm very sorry to hear about your malady. I imagine that must be very difficult 😢

Unfortunately, I was prompted to log into GitLab when tapping that link, so I could not see your repository. In any case, sadly I am not in a position to allocate time to reviewing it in more detail, as I have a number of other commitments at the moment that I must attend to. But hopefully someone else will come across this thread and may be able to provide you with some guidance.

I wish you the very best of luck and hope Pelican continues to serve you well! ✨

[mbridon]

My apologies, I had indeed made the repository private, which meant you had to log in to see it, and you even had to have a login which I had authorized/invited... 🤦

I made it public this time, so you or others can have a look at it and see why I can't seem to redo the same thing for another website. 😊