Chowdown as a gem-based theme ?

[nicolinuxfr]

Hello,

I really like your theme and I would like to use it for my website. There are some small tweaks I want to make and I was looking for the best way to apply them without loosing the ability to update the theme when there is a change here.

I’m new to Jekyll, but I found there is an official way : the gem-based themes. I think it would be the perfect solution for me (and maybe others), since I could override some files without having to edit the master theme.

The transition from a traditional theme to a gem-based one seems not too complicated, if I understand the documentation correctly. But you do need to create an account on https://rubygems.org/ in order to upload the gem. I guess it should be the creator of the theme, so @clarklab, to do it ?

Anyway, thanks for the work you did so far ! And let me know if I can help, though I have only really limited knowledge of Jekyll and Ruby…

[usmanatron]

+1 from me. After reading that link, it does indeed sound reasonably straight-forward.
I'm going to have a go at doing this on a fork and sending a PR. @clarklab - would you be prepared to accept such a change?

One thing that comes to mind: if chowdown becomes a theme gem, how does that affect chowdown.io? While Im not sure, it may make sense to have two separate repositories (one for the theme gem itself and one for chowdown.io i.e. your implementation of the theme). What do you think?

[clarklab]

This sounds like a good idea, but I've gotta admit that I'm not super familiar with Jekyll. This whole project was my attempt at learning it, so it's probably time I hopped in a bit more.

Splitting the theme from the install sounds reasonable (I'm from the WordPress world, where that's the norm). Maintaining two repos is probably a good idea too, one for theme and one for content.

Another thing this brings up is the future plan to solicit more community recipes, and a recipe-only repo might make that a bit easier. Definitely need to chew on it a bit. And just to really spice things up, we can also consider the new front-end I'm starting on soon (based on the current beta design, but removing any CSS frameworks for a really basic build).