Setting up the Zola template
When I started this silly little project some hours ago, I thought that Zonelets was astonishingly simple to replicate. While Zonelets is not exactly a CSS stunt or a JS mess, there are some things that took me way too much time to implement properly.
Yet again, the basics
Themes for Zola usually start from a base.html file. The <head> is not that complicated; it’s just long to write. The most general <body> possible has a navbar at the top, a main section and a rather small footer; these weren’t hard either.
Adding a content Tera block makes filling the main part of a page rather simple. In fact, page.html (for blog posts) and standalone.html (for the about page) almost wrote themselves.
Pagination madness
The hardest thing was to properly set up the “recent articles” section in the index. It shows the last blog entries, but no more than four; and, if there are more than four posts on the sites, then it spawns a link to the archive.
Since I’m not very familiar with the ins and outs of Tera templating, I struggled for half an hour, but then I finally found the correct order of {% if 4 < post_section.pages | length %}.
The archive section was much easier after all that struggle.