What is Pelican?
Pelican is a static site generator, written in Python. Pelican is open source and you can find Pelican on GitHub.
Pelican also supports themes and plugins. You can write your own themes and plugins, or you can download many different themes and plugins already made and ready to go.
Pelican is similar to Jekyll in that both are static site generators and easy to use. The big difference is Pelican is written in Python while Jekyll is written in Ruby. If you prefer Python syntax, like I do, Pelican may be perfect for you.
Pelican Features
Pelican has many different features and tools to help you generate your static web site. Here is a list of the most popular Pelican features:
- Write your content directly with your editor of choice, such as vim or Sublime Text, in reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats.
- Includes a simple CLI tool to run a development/testing web server and (re)generate your site.
- Easy to interface with version control systems and web hooks such as GitHub.
- Completely static output is easy to host anywhere. I use Rackspace Cloud Files CDN.
- Built in support for Articles (such as blog posts) and Pages (such as “About”, “Projects” and “Contact” pages).
- Theming support using Jinja2 templates.
- Code syntax highlighting.
- Atom and RSS feeds
- PDF generation of the articles/pages (optional).
- Comments, via an external service such as Disqus.
- Publication of articles in multiple languages.
- Import your existing site from WordPress, Dotclear, or RSS feeds.
- Integration with external tools: Twitter, Google Analytics, etc. (optional).
Read More about Pelican
For more information about Pelican, take a look at the Pelican Blog, the Pelican code on GitHub, and the Pelican Documentation.