Wouldn’t you like to manage your academic publications list easily within the context of your static website? Without resorting to external services, or to software like bibtex2html, which is very nice but will then require restyling to fit your templates?

Look no more, with the help of pelican-bibtex you can now manage your papers from within Pelican!

At Fabian‘s advice, I started playing around with Pelican, a static website/blog generator for Python. I like it better than the other generators I used before, so I chose it the next time I had to set up a website. I still didn’t make the courage to migrate my current website and blog to it, but I promise I will.

Pelican has a public plugins repository, but they have a license constraint for all contributions. My plugin isn’t complicated, but I had to “reverse engineer” undocumented parts of the pybtex API. I think that maybe that code that I used to render citations programatically can be useful to others, so I don’t want to release it under a restrictive license. For this reason, I publish pelican-bibtex in my personal GitHub account.

You can see it in action in the source code for the website I am working on at the moment, the home page of my research group. Example output generated using pelican-bibtex can be seen here.

Possible extensions¶

I have not dug in too deeply but I believe this plugin can be extended, with not much difficulty, to support referencing in Pelican blogs, and render BibTeX references at the end of every post. This idea was suggested by Avaris on #pelican, and I find it very cool. Since I don’t need this feature at the moment, it’s not a priority, but it’s something that I would like to see at some point.