Octopress/Non-blog Octopress Site

This is a guide to using Octopress for a (mostly) non-blog site.

NOTE: This does not prevent you from using the blog features of Octopress. Fixed content can be served by Octopress alongside blog content. It just describes how to reorganize content to be less blog-centric.

Non-Blog Landing Page

The first thing to do when deploying a non-blog site with Octopress is fixing the landing page so that it doesn't try and show the latest blog posts. This is straightforward to do.

Move Blog Index

First, we don't want to blow away our existing blog index, because we may want to keep using the blog feature. Assuming you're in your project's octopress directory,

cd cantera-source/octopress/

you can move the existing blog index from source to source/blog:

mv source/index.html source/blog/index.html

Make New Index

We can either make a new index page with Markdown, or we can make an HTML page by hand.

The first way looks like this:

touch source/index.markdown

and index.markdown should look like this:

---
layout: default
---

# Howdy

Welcome to the index.

(Or you can use whatever layout you want.)

If you have your own HTML file, you can just put it there:

cp /path/to/my/index.html source/.

Update Navbar

The navbar "blog" button will still point to the index, so update it to point to the new blog index (or get rid of the blog button altogether, if you don't want it). Edit the file source/_includes/custom/navigation.html and add a "Home" button to point to /. Update "Blog" to point to /blog.

Update Config

One last thing you'll have to do is tell Octopress that you've moved the blog index. Edit the Rakefile and change:

blog_index_dir  = 'source'

to:

blog_index_dir  = 'source/blog'