Announcing Reflex, a Pelican theme

I'm happy to announce the public availability of my Pelican theme: Reflex. It is published on PyPI, which should be the best way for most users to install it.

When I first started this blog I decided on Pelican because I had lots of experience with Python, so it would make it easier for me to get involved and contribute. I then looked at all the Pelican themes and settled on the Flex theme by Alexandre Vizenzi because it checked all my requirements:

• Minimalistic and beautiful.
• Responsive layout.
• Archives, categories, tags support.
• Pygments support for code highlighting.
• Light/Dark modes support.

As it was inevitable I eventually hit some missing features and small tweaks I wanted to implement. That is the beauty of open-source, and I started contributing to Flex. However some of my desired changes were too deep, and they didn't fit in Flex as the project was in maintenance mode. After some thinking I decided to fork the theme to introduce my more breaking changes, and that is when Reflex was born.

The main differences with Flex for now:

• Style for Table of Contents created by the toc markdown extension.
• Styles for figure and figcaption HTML elements.
• Shynet tracking support (see my article on self-hosted comments).
• In-repo documentation instead of Github wiki.
• Display language flags for alternative article languages.
• X social icon.
• Improvements to developer experience: gulp watch support for instant changes, AGENTS.md for AI development, revamped GitHub Actions workflows.
• Updated Pygments styles and FontAwesome.

I don't have a long roadmap planned for Reflex, I will mostly implement changes that I find useful for this blog. I'm open to new integrations and ideas, so collaborators are welcome!

For known bugs and planned features take a look at the open issues. For any questions feel free to open a discussion.

If you use Reflex feel free to add your site to the list of Reflex users, I would love to hear from you!