Welcome to Candidus

Candidus is a minimalist blogging theme with optional superpowers. It's built using modern and robust web standards and comes with a lot of additional features. This article walks you through the theme itself and some of its features. Please also have a look into Candidus' documentation.

Why Candidus?

In a nutshell: Candidus is

• performant due to its dynamic import system
• lightweight by excluding styles and scripts that are not needed
• feature-rich and comes with a lot of built-in perks
• robust for it uses modern web technologies
• open source so you can make it your Candidus

We've put a lot of effort into designing, building and documenting a theme that would be as powerful as it is easy to use and hope you'll enjoy it.

Design specifications

Fonts

All fonts are part of the theme and hosted on your own server.

• EB Garamond for texts
• Oswald for headings and accents
• Inconsolata for code

Colors

Colors are predefined using SCSS variables. You can change them to your liking by making changes to the src/style/core/variables.scss file.

• Primary: #3f4d63
• Secondary: #f7c59f
• Recommended Ghost accent color: #bdc5d4

Theme Features

You can find a selection of the most engaging ones below. A more comprehensive list is available in Candidus' documentation pages

Bookmarks

Activate under Post -> Enable bookmarks
Read in documentation

Enabling this feature adds a button to the top navigation bar. When your users select a text section of your articles, they can come back anytime later and keep reading.

Try it yourself: Select this text with your mouse and click on the bookmark icon.

Table of contents

Activate under Post -> Enable table of contents
Read in documentation

This adds a simple ToC to the top of your article. If added, the social share buttons will be moved to the bottom of the page.

Send to ChatGPT

Activate under Post -> Enable chatgpt | Experimental feature

When your readers click on this button, they'll be redirected to ChatGPT with a reference to the article they're currently reading. ChatGPT will then try and summarize the article's content and stand ready to answer a reader's questions at best will.

Alternative newsletters channels

Activate under:
- Homepage -> Select social media when subscription is disabled
- Homepage -> Social media URL when subscription is disabled
Read in Documentation

Instead of subscribing to your newsletter, you can add your most prominent social media channel here, for example X (Twitter) or Dev.to.

Syntax highlighting

Activate using code injection - see below

Candidus uses prism and prism-autoloader to load only necessary syntax colors. To make use of this dynamic, it's necessary to use code injection, which is still straightforward enough.

1. Go to your blog's settings
2. Search for 'Code Injection'
3. Paste the following content to activate Syntax highlighting for light and darkmode (or add the SYNTAX_HIGHLIGHTER property if you already use code the plugin system)

<script>
window.CANDIDUS = {
  SYNTAX_HIGHLIGHTER: {
  	type: "prism"
  }, 
}
</script>

4. Markdown blocks that are annotated with a programming language syntax will now be highlighted automatically

Examples

Block Quotes

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Entwickler Clemens, mit einem Pint
Man hört ihn seufzen, ziemlich hard
Sonntag ist's, die Deadline naht

~ Clemens

Gallery

Code blocks

const initIndexedDb = (dbName, stores) => {
	return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
		const request = indexedDB.open(dbName, dbVersion);
		request.onerror = (event) => {
			reject(event.target.error);
		};
		request.onsuccess = (event) => {
			resolve(event.target.result);
		};
		request.onupgradeneeded = (event) => {
			stores.forEach((store) => {
				const objectStore = event.target.result.createObjectStore(store.name, {
					keyPath: store.keyPath,
				});
				objectStore.createIndex(store.keyPath, store.keyPath, { unique: true });
			});
		};
	});
};

Miscellaneous

Files

Audio

Gandhi His Spiritual Message to the World 17 October 1931

0:00

/364.773878

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