Why Yellow?
· 3 min · ¶
After years of working with WordPress, I yearned for something different and more streamlined. That’s when I stumbled upon flat-file CMSs. I explored several options, including Grav[1], Automad[2], and Kirby[3], but my attention was unexpectedly drawn to Datenstrom’s Yellow[4].
I opted for Datenstrom Yellow over other software because it just felt like the right fit. It’s lightweight and boasts a small yet highly agile community[5]. The individuals involved with Yellow, both in development and support, are incredibly friendly and exceptionally helpful.
Extend it
Furthermore, there is an ample selection of extensions[6] available, allowing you to tailor your installation to suit nearly any situation. Here are a few of the extensions I use:
- Headinglink - Add anchor links next to headings in the content.
- Meta - Meta data for humans and machines.
- Search - Full-text search.
- Readingtime - Show estimated reading time for page content.
However, as previously mentioned, there are many more available.
The Design
I borrowed the design, to the best of my abilities, from Hugo’s[7] PaperMod[8] theme. Why did I do this? Why did I boldly emulate a design? Well, because, on one hand, I genuinely appreciate the simplicity of the theme. More importantly, I simply lack the skills of a designer.
To implement this design, I employed Pico.css[9]. In case you’re not familiar with it, Pico is among the minimal CSS frameworks but stands out with its integrated dark mode, SASS source files, and a plethora of elegant styles for all native HTML elements without requiring .classes
. With Pico, it’s entirely feasible to design a website without delving into extensive stylesheets.
For this particular page, I made slight adjustments to the spacing between HTML elements, all in the name of maintaining a clean and uncluttered design.
And since it was readily available, I created the theme using SASS in my favorite editor, Nova[10]. To enable proper development with Safari Developer Tools, I found it necessary to include the file extensions scss
and map
within the function isSafeFile(
) on line 1826 (v0.8.115) of core.php[11]. According to Mark Seuffert, one of the main developers of Yellow, this could potentially be addressed with an extension. However, my programming skills are somewhat limited, so I plan to seek assistance on GitHub when the opportunity arises.
Update (2023/09/16): Obsidian[12] is currently celebrating the introduction of properties, which is ultimately nothing more than the head of yellow's markdown files.