Theme Upgrade

2020 was too busy… In the middle of the year, I discovered that the material-x theme had been significantly upgraded, but I didn’t have time to update it. By the time 2021 arrived, I gave up on upgrading from the original theme and decided to start a new project based on the documentation.

Hexo Installation and Setup

Turns out my new computer didn’t even have hexo installed… This was a good opportunity to test whether hexo-cli or hexo is necessary. After testing, I found that hexo-cli is sufficient:

sudo pacman -S npm
sudo npm install -g hexo-cli
mkdir neo_blog
hexo init

Volantis Theme and Other Plugin Installation

The installation method for themes has also changed according to the official documentation. Now, it’s done using npm, rather than cloning the project into the themes directory of the blog project.

1 2	npm i hexo-theme-volantis npm i hexo-generator-search hexo-generator-json-content

Editing Configuration Files

The configuration files have also changed (apparently due to changes in hexo). The main change is that theme configurations are no longer recommended to be directly modified in themes/yourTheme/_config.yml or node_modules/yourTheme/_config.yml. Instead, create a _config.yourTheme.yml file at the same level as _config.yml, and write the configuration changes you need into this file. This way, the content of your file will overwrite the content in the theme configuration file (it feels like the JSON configuration files in VSCode). The documentation says that this approach has the benefit that when updating the theme, any configuration changes you make won’t be lost.

Of course, during actual use, I found that the color settings for the Volantis theme didn’t take effect after modifying _config.yourTheme.yml locally. In the end, I had to change the theme’s configuration file for it to work.

After making the necessary changes to the theme content, copy over the original _config.yml, and replace the entire directory with the new blog directory to deploy as usual.

Adding Documentation

Additionally, this time I added documentation. The content hasn’t been updated… It was just a test to see if soft links could be used directly to upload generated documentation. After testing, it didn’t work. For now, I’m temporarily too lazy to learn how to update the blog while updating the documentation. I’ll do it manually for now and figure it out later…