al-folio
The most popular academic Jekyll theme on GitHub with 12,000+ stars. Purpose-built for researchers — includes publication listings, BibTeX integration, a CV page, news feed, and project showcases.
About this Theme
Al-folio began as a clean fork of the Folio theme created for academics, and has grown into the definitive Jekyll theme for researchers, professors, PhD students, and anyone whose online presence needs to showcase academic work professionally.
What sets al-folio apart from general-purpose themes is its deep understanding of what academics actually need. The publications page accepts a BibTeX file and automatically renders it into a beautiful, filterable list — no manual HTML, no copying and pasting. Papers are linked to PDFs, abstracts toggle open on click, and citation counts can be pulled directly from Google Scholar. It is the kind of feature that saves hours of work every time a new paper is published.
The CV page is equally thoughtful, supporting the JSON Resume format so your structured data can be maintained in one place and rendered on the site automatically. Talks, teaching assignments, blog posts, and project showcases each have their own dedicated page templates.
Recent versions have embraced modern tooling — Docker support means reproducible local development, and GitHub Actions handle the build and deployment pipeline. The community around al-folio is exceptionally active, with contributors from universities across the world regularly improving and extending the theme.
Who is it for? Researchers, professors, PhD students, and academics who need a publication-ready personal site that takes their work seriously.
Features
- BibTeX-to-Markdown publication generator
- Dedicated pages for papers, talks, and teaching
- Structured CV page with JSON Resume support
- Google Scholar citation badge integration
- Light and dark mode toggle
- Docker and DevContainer support for local dev
- News and updates feed
- Project showcase with category filtering
- Altmetric and Dimensions badges
- Social media and academic network links
- LaTeX math rendering via MathJax or KaTeX