Paper provides a solid foundation for blogs, or even portfolios, with full Markdown support, built-in dark mode, and a clean layout that works out-of-the-box.

The blog posts of this demo also serve as guides, docs or example articles, making Paper a flexible starting point for your next content-driven site.

Features

• SEO-friendly (built-in Cecil metatags, sitemap, feeds)
• Fast performance (no framework, a few lines of vanilla JavaScript)
• Light & dark mode
• Organizable blog posts (tags, archives, featured posts)
• Responsive & accessible
• Static search with FlexSearch (optional)
• Automatic social image generation

Introduction

Writing a post is enough: if the post has no image in its front matter, the Paper theme generates an Open Graph image (1200 × 628 pixels) with:

• the title of the post
• its author
• the title of the site

The image is published next to the post (e.g.: /posts/dynamic-og-images/og.png) and referenced by the built-in Cecil metatags. Other pages share an image generated with the title and the description of the site (/og.png), unless the site image option is set.

Requirements

Images are generated with the PHP GD extension, compiled with FreeType support. Without it, the default metatags behavior is used.

Customization

• The background of the image is assets/paper/og-background.png: override it with your own assets/paper/og-background.png (1200 × 628 pixels).
• The fonts are assets/paper/fonts/GoogleSansCode-Regular.ttf and assets/paper/fonts/GoogleSansCode-Bold.ttf.
• Disable the generation with the paper.og.dynamic option:

paper:
  og:
    dynamic: false

Use the image front matter variable to define the image of a post:

---
title: My post
image: /images/my-post.png
---

Creating a blog post

To write a new blog post, create a Markdown file inside the pages/posts/ directory.

pages/
└── posts/
    ├── _drafts/
    │   └── an-unfinished-post.md
    ├── 2026/
    │   └── example-post.md
    └── adding-new-post.md

The post URL is built from its file name (or its slug): pages/posts/adding-new-post.md is published at /posts/adding-new-post/.

Front matter

The front matter is the YAML block at the top of the post:

Sample front matter:

---
title: The title of the post
description: Some description about the post.
date: 2026-09-25T04:58:53Z
updated: 2026-10-10T12:00:00Z
author: Your Name
featured: true
tags:
  - some
  - example
  - tags
---

Table of contents

Add [toc] where the table of contents should be displayed (h2 and h3 headings by default).

Headings

There's one thing to note about headings: the post title is the main heading (h1), so the rest of the headings should start from h2.

Callouts

Callouts are Cecil notes:

:::tip
Helpful advice, shortcuts, or best practices.
:::

Steps and accordions

Cecil provides more notes types, such as steps:

And accordions:

Code blocks

Code blocks are highlighted at build time, and a copy button is added:

<?php
$builder = new Cecil\Builder($config);
$builder->build();

Images

Images are stored in the assets/ directory, then referenced with an absolute path:

![A picture of the Paper theme](/images/paper.png)

Click on an image to zoom it.

Footnotes

Footnotes are supported¹.

Install the theme

Allow the theme installer plugin, then require the theme with Composer:

composer require cecil/theme-paper

The dark mode toggle component theme is installed as a dependency. Declare both themes in the configuration file (cecil.yml):

theme:
  - paper
  - darkmodetoggle

Site metadata

Paper relies on the standard Cecil configuration for the site metadata, used by the built-in metatags (title, description, Open Graph, Twitter cards, JSON-LD) and by the feeds:

title: Paper
description: A minimal, responsive and SEO-friendly Cecil blog theme.
baseurl: https://example.com/
author:
  name: Your Name
  url: https://example.com/about/
language: en

Theme options

All the options are namespaced under paper, with these default values:

paper:
  posts:
    section: posts # section containing the blog posts
    home: 4        # number of recent posts displayed on the homepage
  dir: ltr         # text direction: ltr or rtl
  archives: true   # displays the archives link in the header
  back_button: true # displays the "Go back" button on posts
  edit:
    url: ''        # e.g.: https://github.com/<user>/<repo>/edit/main/pages/
  og:
    dynamic: true  # generates Open Graph images of posts without `image`

The number of posts per page is the Cecil pagination option (4 by default with Paper):

pages:
  pagination:
    max: 4

Menu

The header menu is the Cecil main menu. Paper defines the Posts and Tags entries, add your own entries (or pages with menu: main in their front matter):

menus:
  main:
    - {id: about, name: About, url: about, weight: 30}

The archives link, the search button (with FlexSearch) and the light/dark toggle are always displayed after the menu entries.

Social links

Social links are displayed in the footer and on the homepage:

paper:
  socials:
    - {name: github, url: 'https://github.com/username'}
    - {name: x, url: 'https://x.com/username'}
    - {name: linkedin, url: 'https://www.linkedin.com/in/username/'}
    - {name: mail, url: 'mailto:yourmail@example.com'}

Available icons are github, x, linkedin, facebook, telegram, whatsapp, pinterest and mail. Add your own SVG icons in assets/paper/icons/<name>.svg. The link title can be customized with the title key.

Share links

Posts display share links (WhatsApp, Facebook, X, Telegram, Pinterest and email by default). Customize them, or disable them with false:

paper:
  share:
    - {name: x, url: 'https://x.com/intent/post?url='}
    - {name: mail, url: 'mailto:?subject=See%20this%20post&body='}

Edit page link

Set the URL of your repository to display an Edit page link on posts, followed by the path of the Markdown file relative to the pages directory:

paper:
  edit:
    url: https://github.com/username/repository/edit/main/pages/

Hide it on a post with hide_edit: true in the front matter.

Colors

Colors are CSS custom properties: override them in a stylesheet of your site, loaded after the theme one (extend the head_css block of the page.html.twig layout):

:root,
[data-theme='light'] {
  --background: #fdfdfd;
  --foreground: #282728;
  --accent: #006cac;
  --accent-foreground: #ffffff;
  --muted: #e6e6e6;
  --muted-foreground: #6b7280;
  --border: #ece9e9;
}

[data-theme='dark'] {
  --background: #212737;
  --foreground: #eaedf3;
  --accent: #ff6b01;
  --accent-foreground: #ffffff;
  --muted: #343f60;
  --muted-foreground: #afb9ca;
  --border: #ab4b08;
}

The font can be changed with the --paper-font custom property.

This article is from TailwindLabs. I put this article to demonstrate how you can write blog posts/articles using the Paper theme.

By default, Tailwind removes all of the default browser styling from paragraphs, headings, lists and more. This ends up being really useful for building application UIs because you spend less time undoing user-agent styles, but when you really are just trying to style some content that came from a rich-text editor in a CMS or a markdown file, it can be surprising and unintuitive.

We get lots of complaints about it actually, with people regularly asking us things like:

Why is Tailwind removing the default styles on my h1 elements? How do I disable this? What do you mean I lose all the other base styles too? We hear you, but we're not convinced that simply disabling our base styles is what you really want. You don't want to have to remove annoying margins every time you use a p element in a piece of your dashboard UI. And I doubt you really want your blog posts to use the user-agent styles either — you want them to look awesome, not awful.

The @tailwindcss/typography plugin is our attempt to give you what you actually want, without any of the downsides of doing something stupid like disabling our base styles.

It adds a new prose class that you can slap on any block of vanilla HTML content and turn it into a beautiful, well-formatted document:

<article class="prose">
  <h1>Garlic bread with cheese: What the science tells us</h1>
  <p>
    For years parents have espoused the health benefits of eating garlic bread
    with cheese to their children, with the food earning such an iconic status
    in our culture that kids will often dress up as warm, cheesy loaf for
    Halloween.
  </p>
  <p>
    But a recent study shows that the celebrated appetizer may be linked to a
    series of rabies cases springing up around the country.
  </p>
  <!-- ... -->
</article>

For more information about how to use the plugin and the features it includes, read the documentation.

What to expect from here on out

What follows from here is just a bunch of absolute nonsense I've written to dogfood the plugin itself. It includes every sensible typographic element I could think of, like bold text, unordered lists, ordered lists, code blocks, block quotes, and even italics.

It's important to cover all of these use cases for a few reasons:

1. We want everything to look good out of the box.
2. Really just the first reason, that's the whole point of the plugin.
3. Here's a third pretend reason though a list with three items looks more realistic than a list with two items.

Now we're going to try out another header style.

Typography should be easy

So that's a header for you — with any luck if we've done our job correctly that will look pretty reasonable.

Something a wise person once told me about typography is:

Typography is pretty important if you don't want your stuff to look like trash. Make it good then it won't be bad. It's probably important that images look okay here by default as well:

Now I'm going to show you an example of an unordered list to make sure that looks good, too:

• So here is the first item in this list.
• In this example we're keeping the items short.
• Later, we'll use longer, more complex list items.

And that's the end of this section.

What if we stack headings?

We should make sure that looks good, too.

Sometimes you have headings directly underneath each other. In those cases you often have to undo the top margin on the second heading because it usually looks better for the headings to be closer together than a paragraph followed by a heading should be.

When a heading comes after a paragraph …

When a heading comes after a paragraph, we need a bit more space, like I already mentioned above. Now let's see what a more complex list would look like.

• I often do this thing where list items have headings.

  For some reason I think this looks cool which is unfortunate because it's pretty annoying to get the styles right.

  I often have two or three paragraphs in these list items, too, so the hard part is getting the spacing between the paragraphs, list item heading, and separate list items to all make sense. Pretty tough honestly, you could make a strong argument that you just shouldn't write this way.

• Since this is a list, I need at least two items.

  I explained what I'm doing already in the previous list item, but a list wouldn't be a list if it only had one item, and we really want this to look realistic. That's why I've added this second list item so I actually have something to look at when writing the styles.

• It's not a bad idea to add a third item either.

  I think it probably would've been fine to just use two items but three is definitely not worse, and since I seem to be having no trouble making up arbitrary things to type, I might as well include it.

After this sort of list I usually have a closing statement or paragraph, because it kinda looks weird jumping right to a heading.

Code should look okay by default.

I think most people are going to use highlight.js or Prism or something if they want to style their code blocks but it wouldn't hurt to make them look okay out of the box, even with no syntax highlighting.

Here's what a default tailwind.config.js file looks like at the time of writing:

module.exports = {
  purge: [],
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  variants: {},
  plugins: [],
};

Hopefully that looks good enough to you.

What about nested lists?

Nested lists basically always look bad which is why editors like Medium don't even let you do it, but I guess since some of you goofballs are going to do it we have to carry the burden of at least making it work.

1. Nested lists are rarely a good idea.
   • You might feel like you are being really "organized" or something but you are just creating a gross shape on the screen that is hard to read.
   • Nested navigation in UIs is a bad idea too, keep things as flat as possible.
   • Nesting tons of folders in your source code is also not helpful.
2. Since we need to have more items, here's another one.
   • I'm not sure if we'll bother styling more than two levels deep.
   • Two is already too much, three is guaranteed to be a bad idea.
   • If you nest four levels deep you belong in prison.
3. Two items isn't really a list, three is good though.
   • Again please don't nest lists if you want people to actually read your content.
   • Nobody wants to look at this.
   • I'm upset that we even have to bother styling this.

The most annoying thing about lists in Markdown is that <li> elements aren't given a child <p> tag unless there are multiple paragraphs in the list item. That means I have to worry about styling that annoying situation too.

• For example, here's another nested list.

  But this time with a second paragraph.

  • These list items won't have <p> tags
  • Because they are only one line each

• But in this second top-level list item, they will.

  This is especially annoying because of the spacing on this paragraph.

  • As you can see here, because I've added a second line, this list item now has a <p> tag.

    This is the second line I'm talking about by the way.

  • Finally here's another list item so it's more like a list.

• A closing list item, but with no nested list, because why not?

And finally a sentence to close off this section.

There are other elements we need to style

I almost forgot to mention links, like this link to the Tailwind CSS website. We almost made them blue but that's so yesterday, so we went with dark gray, feels edgier.

We even included table styles, check it out:

We also need to make sure inline code looks good, like if I wanted to talk about <span> elements or tell you the good news about @tailwindcss/typography.

Sometimes I even use code in headings

Even though it's probably a bad idea, and historically I've had a hard time making it look good. This "wrap the code blocks in backticks" trick works pretty well though really.

Another thing I've done in the past is put a code tag inside of a link, like if I wanted to tell you about the tailwindcss/docs repository. I don't love that there is an underline below the backticks but it is absolutely not worth the madness it would require to avoid it.

We haven't used an h4 yet

But now we have. Please don't use h5 or h6 in your content, Medium only supports two heading levels for a reason, you animals. I honestly considered using a before pseudo-element to scream at you if you use an h5 or h6.

We don't style them at all out of the box because h4 elements are already so small that they are the same size as the body copy. What are we supposed to do with an h5, make it smaller than the body copy? No thanks.

We still need to think about stacked headings though.

Let's make sure we don't screw that up with h4 elements, either.

Phew, with any luck we have styled the headings above this text and they look pretty good.

Let's add a closing paragraph here so things end with a decently sized block of text. I can't explain why I want things to end that way but I have to assume it's because I think things will look weird or unbalanced if there is a heading too close to the end of the document.

What I've written here is probably long enough, but adding this final sentence can't hurt.