Skip to content

Hamakor/pycon-il-2025

Repository files navigation

Website for PyCon Israel 2025

Website built with Pelican, using a PyCon-Israel-peliconf theme based on peliconf. This is a static website (this is what Pelican does), but it relies on a Pretalx system that manages and presents the schedule, talks and speakers.

This continues the work started with the PyCon Israel 2024 website; we have moved to a new theme, but kept some ideas from our adaptation of the old theme.

Tools and building

The Python side is managed by Poetry. Use poetry install to get the dependencies.

The theme styling is built with gulp and other npm tools. If you want to change anything in the CSS,

  • Preparation: Go to the folder website_2025/themes/PyCon-Israel-peliconf, and there run the command npm install
  • "Compilation" (mostly of the Sass sources): Run the command npm run build

When you want to build the site itself, use make html from the website_2025 folder. It puts the built site in output. You can use make clean to remove everything if you want to rebuild from scratch; but it doesn't clean the theme files.

You can also use make devserver for the HTML, and npm run watch for the styling -- these create watchers which update the output as you change the source files.

See below for building the speaker's page when and if it becomes relevant.

Deployment

This repo is set up to deploy by Github Actions, to a GitHub Pages page. On the main repo, this gets deployed to https://hamakor.github.io/pycon-il-2025/ which is proxied from https://pycon.org.il/2025 . For this proxy to work well, the SITEURL setting points to that latter URL, rather than directly to the GitHub Pages (as usual with Pelican, in publishing we set the URLs to absolute and not relative).

The deploy operation is defined to trigger only on pushes to main.

The configuration settings are defined in website_2025/pelicanconf.py (for development) and publishconf.py (for "production").

Note that all explanations about Github here are valid at the time written, but Github may change their UI, or the way Pages and Actions work.

Alternate Deployment

The trivial case where you'd want an alternate deployment is when preparing changes in the website contents, on a fork of the main repository. Then, the only thing you really need to change is the SITEURL. The Github Action is set to read this from a Github Environment Variable PLCN_SITEURL, so you can just set that to your fork's Github Pages site URL.

To set environment variables in Github, go to your repository settings, select "Secrets and variables" (under "Security"), and in the submenu choose "Actions".

In case you want your deployment to include the Speakers page, you also need to set two further variables: PRETALX_API_TOKEN and PRETALX_EVENT_NAME. They will fill the roles of <api-token> and <event-slug>, as described in the relevant section of this page.

Note that these are all defined as variables, not secrets. This is generally OK -- variables are only visible to people who have access to your repo settings, and the log of actions (where the token is printed) is also not publicly accessible.

In case you want your deployment to include other configuration changes which should not be part of the main deployment, you can put them in a file alternateconf.py next to pelicanconf.py and publishconf.py; definitions from alternateconf.py will override those from publishconf.py (which, in turn, inherit and override those in pelicanconf.py). The alternateconf.py file does not exist in the main branch, in order to make it easy to keep a separate branch in which it is added (and which you can then push to main on your own repo).

Content

Pages are in website_2025/content/pages, and are written in Markdown. At the top of each page there is a block of metadata. Of these, the Title field is very visible, but also critical are the Slug and Lang fields which define the page identity (the Hebrew and English versions of a page should have the same Slug; otherwise, different pages should have different Slugs). The page_number field determines the order of the page in the list of pages in the menu.

The home page, as usual in Pelican, is defined by an index.html template in the theme. It is a single template for both English and Hebrew, and takes many of its strings from settings.

At the time this is written, the settings use two different methods for the bilingual strings:

  • In one, the settings are defined as top-level variables in English, with the Hebrew translation as an entry in a dictionary under I18N_SUBSITES; this allows settings to be referenced plainly in the template, but separates the language-specific definitions of the setting from eachother.
  • In the other, the settings are defined as a dictionary with entries 'en' and 'he'. This lets us put the two definitions together, but requires the template to reference them as SETTING[DEFAULT_LANG].

Other interesting files to look at:

  • Our use of the theme, and changes we made to the original, are explained in website_2025/themes/PyCon-Israel-peliconf/README.md
  • All (non-partial) templates extend website_2025/themes/PyCon-Israel-peliconf/templates/base.html -- that means that template defines structure for everything.

References of software used

Speaker's page -- not currently relevant

(keeping here the note from 2024, some variation should become relvant later)

To create the speakers page, you need to run the speakers.py script (found in the repo's root folder) from inside the virtualenv like this (assuming the site is generated from website_2024 folder):

python ./speakers.py <event-slug> -t <api-token> -o ./website_2024/content/pages/speakers.md

In this command, <event-slug> is the slug for the event in Pretalx, and <api-token> is an authentication token you can get from your Pretalx profile page. For PyCon Israel 2024, event-slug is pycon-2024, and your profile page is https://cfp.pycon.org.il/pycon-2024/me/ .