Theme Development in Octopress

Question

Octopress is a great blogging engine; however, I seem to have a lot of trouble finding how to create a new theme in Octopress.

The official guide I found (http://octopress.org/docs/theme/) only limits to how to modify the official theme, and doesn't really detail the syntax such as

{% assign index = true %}
{% for post in paginator.posts %}
{% assign content = post.content %}

nor the directory structures. Other theme creators (http://billpatrianakos.me/blog/2012/10/31/the-making-of-an-octopress-theme/) have simply done this by looking at the default theme, which is the path I might take.

But before I embark on this strenuous process, I want to know if there is some kind of guide to creating Octopress themes that I might have missed.

Thank you,

Answer 1

Octopress themes are in reality just Jekyll templates (Octopress is a wrapper around Jekyll that provides nice extras) which use the Liquid templating engine.

You can learn more about Jekyll (including the directory structure) from the documentation. You can learn more about Liquid tags on their GitHub wiki.

Answer 2

You could look at other people theme code on github: https://github.com/imathis/octopress/wiki/3rd-Party-Octopress-Themes