Wikipedia defines theme as “a preset package containing graphical appearance details”. Jekyll Bootstrap has a wonderful-sounding page on “Using Themes”, implying a meaning of “theme” consistent with the Wikipedia definition. The Jekyll Bootstrap home page claims that “Jekyll Bootstrap is the first Jekyll blogging engine to support modular theming.” It’s too bad that the theme browser includes a mere half-dozen themes that are several years old. A Github search for jekyll theme yields over 550 repository results — which appear to be forks of a Jekyll installation with asset and config changes applied.
Not what most people (or most developers/designers, at least) think a “theme” is.
So why aren’t there gobs of standalone, installable themes out there? How come the world seems to have ended in 2012 for Jekyll theming? (Were the Mayans onto something after all?) The Jekyll Bootstrap docs have a nice write-up of the Theme API, Version 0.1.0, which recommends that the would-be theme author “[view] and study the repos for current published themes”, linking to a moribund Github repo.
What happened?
