Creating an octopress theme from a wordpress theme

Question

That's exactly what I did recently:

I copied a friend's Wordpress theme (with permission) of almost the same design:

"I want to know if its relatively possible"

To answer your first concern, the answer is a big ol' YES. That's what make Jekyll so good for these kind of things: it's just raw HTML and css and js in a few directories. Place them anywhere you like, and start cutting away at chunks in includes, wrap some plugins, etc and before you know it, you are rake generate and rake deploy.

Octopress makes it even sweeter by having a large number of plugins, a blog-like template system already structured*** (see below), and bunch of defaults all setup for blogging.

The issue with Octopress' theme is as I said above, it is purely setup as a blogging platform. You'd need to highly modify, or in my case just completely ignore, the template they have and just piggy back on the nice Github Pages, SCSS, and plugins it comes with and roll your own html templates. It's really really really easy.

Where do you start?

/source/index.html

You start here with this YAML file. At the top is a definition of layout, which is used to pick what "wrapper" or layout you want to surround this index.html content with. To make a new template, one like yours, I'd call it layout: fuse_homepage. Then go into source/_layouts/ and create a new `fuse_homepage.html'.

Start with your own theme and format as you want

But see, you don't even have to do that. Hell, just paste your entire homepage HTML right into that source/index.html to start with (make sure to keep the --- YAML markers at the top, but get rid of the layout). Start there and break things out later when you get tired of coping and pasting the header/footers. Heck, just start there - make a fuse_header.html and fuse_footer.html and just share those for now.

Ignore Octopress' theme layout - it's just for hackers that don't do UX and just want to tweak things. Designers or people that like to control their code will want to roll your own.

It really is that flexible. However you want to break it up, you can. Want a new page, just call rake new_page["title"], which all this does is create either an /title.html, or /title/index.html, depending on your settings in the config file. But see, you don't even have to do that. Just create the file yourself - BAM, it is copied on deployment.

Regrets with Octopress

Trying to force the themes to do my bidding, chasing rabbits

I only regret trying to follow the Octopress' author's format - wasted so much time and got so turned off at Octopress. In the end, I just ignored it and did my own. Much easier, and I know where everything is. I also wanted nice and cleanly formatted HTML - a show that I care about my code. The default Octorpess theme and structure invites so many mis-placed tabs and spaces that it's just ugly. Doing your own, you are in full control, space by little space insert.

Importing posts

There's a huge amount of Google links to help you export your WRX from Wordpress, and to generate a the post files automagically. Be prepared to try several different ones as they aren't all perfect.

import comments into Disqus

Unless you are already using Disqus on Wordpress, you are going to have a horrible time with this one.

I can now claim myself to be an WRX/BlogML expert after my nearly 100 tries of importing and exporting and fixing and so on. There is no documentation on either importer (Disqus nor Wordpress) to tell you of the individual required fields. For example, Wordpress requires wp:comment_id to be set, and unique for each and every post you import whereas Disqus requires an wp:comment_email field, even though say it is optional (it's BS, argh).

Be prepared to hack code. It is a hacker's framework after all

Do note though: it is a lot of work to hack around the static site. Doing your own template will save you so much time. You'll also may want to write your own custom plugins, which I did, to get around the bugs in peoples github repos - it's pretty easy, but does require coding.

I spent about a month off and on until I got my new blog/static site to where I liked it for launch. A lot more than I wanted, but it was "fun" learning new languages (Ruby, Python, installed Debian linux in a VM cause Windows just sucks at that stuff).

If you aren't prepared to write that much, there are a couple more static site generators out there as I blogged about (hey, got to show off my Octopress and custom theme!):

http://eduncan911.com/software/the-static-blog-boom.html

Btw, nice site...