Minimal Mistakes Jekyll theme

Minimal Mistakes is a flexible two-column Jekyll theme, perfect for building personal sites, blogs, and portfolios. As the name implies, styling is purposely minimalistic to be enhanced and customized by you.

Notable features

• Bundled as a “theme gem” for easier installation/upgrading.
• Compatible with GitHub Pages.
• Support for Jekyll’s built-in Sass/SCSS preprocessor.
• Nine different skins (color variations).
• Several responsive layout options (single, archive index, search, splash, and paginated home page).
• Optimized for search engines with support for Twitter Cards and Open Graph data.
• Optional header images, custom sidebars, table of contents, galleries, related posts, breadcrumb links, navigation lists, and more.
• Commenting support (powered by Disqus, Facebook, Google+, Discourse, static-based via Staticman, and utterances).
• Google Analytics support.
• UI localized text in English (default), Brazilian Portuguese (Português brasileiro), Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French (Français), German (Deutsch), Greek, Hindi (हिंदी), Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian (Italiano), Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Nepali (Nepalese), Persian (فارسی), Polish, Punjabi (ਪੰਜਾਬੀ), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Español), Swedish, Thai, Turkish (Türkçe), and Vietnamese.

Skins (color variations)

This theme comes in nine different skins (including the default one).

air	contrast	dark

dirt	mint	sunrise

aqua	neon	plum

Demo pages

Name	Description
Post with Header Image	A post with a large header image.
HTML Tags and Formatting Post	A variety of common markup showing how the theme styles them.
Syntax Highlighting Post	Post displaying highlighted code.
Post with a Gallery	A post showing several images wrapped in <figure> elements.
Sample Collection Page	Single page from a collection.
Categories Archive	Posts grouped by category.
Tags Archive	Posts grouped by tag.

Additional sample posts are available under posts archive on the demo site. Source files for these (and the entire demo site) can be found in /docs.

Installation

There are three ways to install: as a gem-based theme, as a remote theme (GitHub Pages compatible), or forking/directly copying all of the theme files into your project.

Gem-based method

With Gem-based themes, directories such as the assets, _layouts, _includes, and _sass are stored in the theme’s gem, hidden from your immediate view. Yet all of the necessary directories will be read and processed during Jekyll’s build process.

This allows for easier installation and updating as you don’t have to manage any of the theme files. To install:

1. Add the following to your Gemfile:

   gem "minimal-mistakes-jekyll"
   

2. Fetch and update bundled gems by running the following Bundler command:

   bundle
   

3. Set the theme in your project’s Jekyll _config.yml file:

   theme: minimal-mistakes-jekyll
   

To update the theme run bundle update.

Remote theme method

Remote themes are similar to Gem-based themes, but do not require Gemfile changes or whitelisting making them ideal for sites hosted with GitHub Pages.

To install:

1. Create/replace the contents of your Gemfile with the following:

   source "https://rubygems.org"
   
   gem "github-pages", group: :jekyll_plugins
   

2. Add jekyll-include-cache to the plugins array of your _config.yml.

3. Fetch and update bundled gems by running the following Bundler command:

   bundle
   

4. Add remote_theme: "mmistakes/[email protected]" to your _config.yml file. Remove any other theme: or remote_theme: entry.

Looking for an example? Fork the Minimal Mistakes remote theme starter for the quickest method of getting a GitHub Pages hosted site up and running. Replace sample content with your own and configure as needed.

Usage

For detailed instructions on how to configure, customize, add/migrate content, and more read the theme’s documentation.

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Contributing

Having trouble working with the theme? Found a typo in the documentation? Interested in adding a feature or fixing a bug? Then by all means submit an issue or pull request. If this is your first pull request, it may be helpful to read up on the GitHub Flow first.

Minimal Mistakes has been designed as a base for you to customize and fit your site’s unique needs. Please keep this in mind when requesting features and/or submitting pull requests. If it’s not something that most people will use, I probably won’t consider it. When in doubt ask.

This goes for author sidebar links and “share button” additions — I have no intention of merging in every possibly option, the essentials are there to get you started :smile:.

Pull Requests

When submitting a pull request:

1. Clone the repo.
2. Create a branch off of master and give it a meaningful name (e.g. my-awesome-new-feature).
3. Open a pull request on GitHub and describe the feature or fix.

Theme documentation and demo pages can be found in the /docs if submitting improvements, typo corrections, etc.

Development

To set up your environment to develop this theme, run bundle install.

To test the theme, run bundle exec rake preview and open your browser at http://localhost:4000/test/. This starts a Jekyll server using content in the test/ directory. As modifications are made to the theme and test site, it will regenerate and you should see the changes in the browser after a refresh.