🌱 tabi

An accessible Zola theme with search, multi-language support, optional JavaScript, a perfect Lighthouse score, and comprehensive documentation. Crafted for personal websites and blogs.

[!TIP] Want to start blogging right away? Use the tabi-start template to get a complete site up and running in minutes.

See a live preview (and the theme's documentation) here.

Explore the Sites Using tabi section to see real-world applications.

tabi (旅, /tɐˈbi/): Journey.

tabi has a perfect score on Google's Lighthouse audit:

Features

• Set any language as default. Set your base site to Chinese, Spanish, French, Hindi… or any other supported language. The theme's interface will be translated accordingly.
• Integration with remote repositories on GitHub, GitLab, Gitea & Codeberg for commit history and showing the site source.
• Series support for creating sequential content like tutorials, courses, and multi-part stories.
• Dark and light themes. Defaults to the OS setting, with a switcher in the navigation bar.
• Thorough documentation. See Mastering tabi Settings: A Comprehensive Guide.
• Perfect Lighthouse score (Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO).
• Comprehensive multi-language support. Add as many languages as you wish.
• Support for comments using giscus, utterances, Hyvor Talk, or Isso.
• Code syntax highlighting with colours based on Catppuccin Frappé.
• Mermaid support to create diagrams and charts with text.
• Local search with an accessible, multi-lingual interface.
• Custom Twitter card and automatic Open Graph tags.
• KaTeX support for mathematical notation.
• Stylized and human readable Atom feed.
• Stylized and human readable sitemap.
• Mail encoding for spam protection.
• All JavaScript can be fully disabled.
• Customizable Table of Contents.
• Customizable secure headers.
• Copy button for code blocks.
• Quick navigation buttons.
• Custom copyright notice.
• Custom canonical URLs.
• Custom shortcodes.
• Customizable skins.
• Social media cards.
• Responsive design.
• Projects page.
• Archive page.
• Pinned posts.
• Social links.
• Tags.

Installation

[!NOTE] The fastest way to create a new site is to use the tabi-start template. This gives you a complete blog setup with all the essential configuration ready to go.

Manual installation

To add tabi to you existing Zola site:

0. Initialize a Git repository in your project directory (if you haven't already):

git init

1. Add the theme as a git submodule:

git submodule add https://github.com/welpo/tabi.git themes/tabi

Or clone the theme into your themes directory:

git clone https://github.com/welpo/tabi.git themes/tabi

Required configuration

2. Enable the theme in your config.toml:

theme = "tabi"

3. Set a title in your config.toml:

title = "Your Site Title"

4. Configure code block highlighting in your config.toml:

[markdown]
highlight_code = true
highlight_theme = "css"

5. Create a content/_index.md file. This file controls how your home page looks and behaves. Choose one of the following options:

   Option A: Serve posts from /:

   +++
   title = "Home"
   paginate_by = 5  # Show 5 posts per page.
   +++
   

   • This will display posts in content/ with pagination.

   Option B: Serve posts from a different path (e.g., blog/):

   +++
   title = "Home"
   # Note we're not setting `paginate_by` here.
   
   [extra]
   section_path = "blog/_index.md"  # Where to find your posts.
   max_posts = 5  # Show 5 posts on the home page.
   +++
   

   • This will display the latest 5 posts from the blog/ section.
   • Do not set paginate_by if you choose this option.
   • Use the full path to the section's _index.md file. Using section_path = "blog/" will not work.

[!WARNING] Do not set both paginate_by and section_path in content/_index.md.

These settings are mutually exclusive and using both may result in no posts being displayed.

6. If you want an introduction section (see screenshot above), add these lines to content/_index.md:

[extra]
header = {title = "Hello! I'm tabi~", img = "img/main.webp", img_alt = "Your Name" }

The content outside the front matter will be rendered between the header title and the posts listing. In the screenshot above, it's the text that reads "tabi is a fast, lightweight, and modern Zola theme…".

7. If you want a multilingual site, you will need to set up each language. In config.toml, set the title and taxonomies for each language, like:

[languages.es]
title = "~/tabi"
taxonomies = [{name = "tags", feed = true}]

You will need an _index.{language_code}.md per language for each section (e.g. /blog or /projects) that you want to enable in that language.

The same is true for individual posts, which should have the exact same name as the default language, with an extra .{code} before the extension (e.g. the Spanish version of security.md would be security.es.md).

This configuration allows the language switcher to take the user to the translation of the current URL. If a translation doesn't exist, the 404 page will be displayed, with an explanation in each language set in the config.

To learn more about multilingual support, see the Frequently Asked Questions.

Updating tabi

If you added the theme as a git submodule, run:

git submodule update --remote themes/tabi

If you cloned it:

cd themes/tabi
git pull

Sites using tabi

Website	Creator	Description	Site Source
osc.garden	Óscar Fernández (welpo)	Data science, psychology, and Zola	Source
sandip.live	Sandip G (sandman)	Startups, tech and the good life	Source
seadve.github.io	Dave Patrick Caberto (SeaDve)	Personal blog and portfolio with custom CSS	Source
mikufan.page	Nadia	Personal blog	Source
tim-boettcher.online	Tim Böttcher	Insights and ramblings of a deafblind programmer	Source
www.richtman.au	Ariel Richtman	Personal tech blog	Source
Ponderosa Games	John Burak (JVimes)	A friendly indie game company	—
jmbhughes.com	Marcus Hughes (jmbhughes)	Personal blog	Source
szabolcs.me	Szabolcs Fazekas (szabolcsf)	Personal blog	Source
Nizzlay	Niels Gouman (Nizzlay)	Personal blog	Source
ZzMzaw's blog	ZzMzaw (ZzMzaw)	Personal blog	Source

Using tabi? Feel free to create a PR and add your site to this list.

Inspiration

This theme was inspired by:

• shadharon — tabi started as a fork of syedzayyan's theme
• tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog
• abridge

Support

Something not working? Have an idea? Let us know!

• Questions? → Start a discussion
• Found a bug? → Report it here
• Feature request? → Tell us more!

Contributing

Please do! We appreciate bug reports, improvements to translations or documentation (however minor), feature requests…

Take a look at the Contributing Guidelines to learn more.

License

The code is available under the MIT license.