Customizing the look and feel of the site

The sphinx site itself looks better than the sites created with the default css, so here we’ll invoke TS Elliots’ maxim “Talent imitates, but genius steals” and grab their css and part of their layout. As before, you can either get the required files _static/default.css, _templates/layout.html and _static/logo.png from the website or svn (see Fetching the data). Since I did a svn checkout before, I will just copy the stuff I need from there:

home:~/tmp/sampledoc> cp ../sampledoc_tut/_static/default.css _static/
home:~/tmp/sampledoc> cp ../sampledoc_tut/_templates/layout.html _templates/
home:~/tmp/sampledoc> cp ../sampledoc_tut/_static/logo.png _static/
home:~/tmp/sampledoc> ls _static/ _templates/
_static/:
basic_screenshot.png        default.css             logo.png

_templates/:
layout.html

Sphinx will automatically pick up the css and layout html files since we put them in the default places with the default names, but we have to manually include the logo in our layout.html. Let’s take a look at the layout file: the first part puts a horizontal navigation bar at the top of our page, like you see on the sphinx and matplotlib sites, the second part includes a logo that when we click on it will take us home and the last part moves the vertical navigation panels to the right side of the page:

{% extends "!layout.html" %}


{% block rootrellink %}
        <li><a href="{{ pathto('index') }}">home</a>|&nbsp;</li>
        <li><a href="{{ pathto('search') }}">search</a>|&nbsp;</li>
       <li><a href="{{ pathto('contents') }}">documentation </a> &raquo;</li>
{% endblock %}


{% block relbar1 %}

<div style="background-color: white; text-align: left; padding: 10px 10px 15px 15px">
<a href="{{ pathto('index') }}"><img src="{{
pathto("_static/logo.png", 1) }}" border="0" alt="sampledoc"/></a>
</div>
{{ super() }}
{% endblock %}

{# put the sidebar before the body #}
{% block sidebar1 %}{{ sidebar() }}{% endblock %}
{% block sidebar2 %}{% endblock %}

Once you rebuild the site with a make html and reload the page in your browser, you should see a fancier site that looks like this