How to customize your _config.yml

One of the most common complaints I recieved after opensourcing the theme was that the customizability of the site at the level of liquid and ruby code was extremely inaccessible to people who just wanted to get it up and running. To be honest, up until then I was under the impression that everyone using the theme were some kind of technically proficient people who just didn't have the time to whip up their own theme, and are resorting to themes such as mine just so that they could have a decent looking site to share their works. The reality only dawned upon me when I got like several emails from people involved in the digital garden subculture—most of them from outside of tech—told me how they liked the features but were unable to use it effectively because it was obscured by something-something-brackety-brackets-and-colons-and-equalsigns. So this is my attempt at trying to ease the customization process.

If you are someone with even a tiny bit of programming background, I would advice you to look into '_includes' folder and go to the corresponding file name and tinker with it.

For those of you who are not into programming, I have tried to extract as many features as I can to _config.yml file, so that you can at least take the advantage of some if not all the features that are customizable.

This table explains all the customizable variables in _config.yml. Most of the main variables have a property called enabled, which when set to true will enable the main variable. For eg. turn on subheading by setting the enabled property to true, if it is already true, set it to false and see what happens.

Variables	Behavior
baseurl	Base Url is where do you want the site to be served from, the top level directory. You can set it to / if you want to be served from the root directory, or else you can set to something like post or blog or something similar
url	This variable takes in the url of your site. This is the url that you registered with you domain registrar. Sometimes it can also be something different, such as in the case of github pages it would something like <username>.github.io
heading	This is the name of the site, this can only be renamed. It cannot be turned on or off
subheading	This is the subheading of the site, you can enable or disable it. You can change the subheading by changing the name property in it. Note: This cannot be toggled if the site tagline is turned off
tagline	This is the tagline of the site, you can toggle it using the enabled property in it. You can change the tagline by change the name property in it. Note: Toggling this off will also toggle off the subheading. This is a design decision because it looks ugly to have heading and subheading without anything to distinguish between the two.
copyright	I believe this is sort of self-explanatory. The year property takes the year and msg property takes the message, which in most cases is just your name or your organization's name. Oh and msg is a mandatory property for the copyright to enabled as it doesn't have any enabled property
user	This is one of the most interesting variables there is. Turning it on or off will remove the profile dashboard on the home-screen.It can be turned on or off using the display property. Setting display to true will look like this: and With it turned off like this:
name	Self-Explanatory. Note: Depends on user variable being turned on/off. If the user variable is turned off, none of its properties like name, bio, email, social will show up on the profile board.
bio	Self-Explanatory. Note: Depends on user variable being turned on/off. If the user variable is turned off, none of its properties like name, bio, email, social will show up on the profile board.
email	Self-Explanatory. Note: Depends on user variable being turned on/off. If the user variable is turned off, none of its properties like name, bio, email, social will show up on the profile board.
photo	This is the avatar that you see on the profile board when you turn the user variable on. Note: Depends on user variable being turned on/off. If the user variable is turned off, none of its properties like name, bio, email, social will show up on the profile board.
social	This is similar to the user property in that you can toggle the sub-properties by toggling it on/off. You can enable or disable the social variable by setting the enabled property to true/false. All the subproperties are fixed. You cannot add a new social media site, design constraint :( All the social media properties take a username as input, if you don't want a particular social handle to be displayed, please leave the field blank or type in null.
preferences	This variable is a special type of variable. It is only for usage in the code. Don't worry, if you are not interested in the code, you won't have any use for it anyway.
search	This variable can toggled on or off by setting the enabled property. The shortcut_hint property is just a toggle for the markup that show Shift + S on the search bar
wiki-style link	This variable allows you to opt-in or out of the wiki-style double brackets for specifiying internal and external links.
sidenotes	This variable covers both sidenotes and margin notes. Toggling this on-or-off will allow you use the custom sidenote syntax you saw in the How to use Simply Jekyll features on your websiteHow to use Simply Jekyll features on your website Welcome to this feature usage tour. This is going to be another short post that describes how to use all the fancy features we saw in [[Exploring the features of Simply Jekyll]]. So without further... post.
transclusion	Similar to sidenotes
pagepreview	This variable controls the on-hover behavior of internal links, that is, if you hover over an internal link it will show a small preview tooltip thingy if this variable turned on.
wrapping	This variable allows you to wrap text using a wrapped box. Eg. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.
highlight	Any text inside the highlight syntax mentioned in the How to use Simply Jekyll features on your websiteHow to use Simply Jekyll features on your website Welcome to this feature usage tour. This is going to be another short post that describes how to use all the fancy features we saw in [[Exploring the features of Simply Jekyll]]. So without further... will be highlighted based on the color you mention in the color property of the variable. Eg. This is how it will look when highlighted.
backlinks	This variable controls the references that you see at the bottom of a post. Note that toggling it off will also remove it from the contextmenu. SEE Below:
related	This variable controls the references related by tags that you see at the bottom of a post. Note that toggling it off will also remove it from the contextmenu. Similar to backlinks.
contextmenu	This variable allows you to right click on the post list on the home page to do things like copy links, see backlinks and related posts without going in.