Minimal-mistakes: It would be nice if it works after download

This was by design. I purposely removed all of the demo posts, pages, and collections because that is content and not part of the _theme_. You'd be surprised how many people had no clue they could (or should) remove them. For example you know how many forks kept the "Theme Setup" page? Answer. A TON!

And as you even said:

Even though people will be changing files after cloning etc.

All the more reason to remove the demo content. Why give people an extra step if they're going to remove it anyways?

Regardless I did leave the index.html page in tact and it does get you to a base site.

It looks to me as if you're using my gh-pages branch which you really shouldn't be doing.

If you use master you'll get the normal "Recent Posts" homepage albeit with no posts. My gh-pages branch has baseurl: /minimal-mistakes set which means you have to access it at http://localhost:4000/minimal-mistakes/ when running bundle exec jekyll serve because of said baseurl. I'm assuming amplify and Jekyll-bootstrap are the same way and have a base url set to properly serve their projects with GitHub Pages. An easy problem to solve... remove that line from _config.yml or append the base to localhost:4000

Here is my approach

1. git clone https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes mymm
2. bundle the folder
3. git clone https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes-demo
4. Copy demo files over the template:
   cp -r ./minimal-mistakes-demo ./mymm
   (in the future, I'll move from folder containing my files)
5. bundle exec jekyll serve

This results in this error message:

  Liquid Exception: The included file '/Users/mac/gits/jekyll/minimal-mistakes/_includes/feature-row' should exist and should not be a symlink in minimal-mistakes-demo/_pages/splash-page.md
jekyll 3.0.3 | Error:  The included file '/Users/mac/gits/jekyll/minimal-mistakes/_includes/feature-row' should exist and should not be a symlink

I found the Gem-based "quick start" instructions did not result in a fully working install. I found this issue logged when searching for information. I am just posting this as feedback and in case it helps others who may end up here with the same problems. Here are the steps which worked for me for a complete working install, albeit containing only one post:

$ gem install jekyll bundler
$ jekyll new jekyll-mm
$ cd jekyll-mm
$ sed -i -e 's/"minima".*/"minimal-mistakes-jekyll"/' Gemfile
$ bundle install
$ rm _config.yml index.md about.md
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes/master/_config.yml
$ echo 'theme: minimal-mistakes-jekyll' >> _config.yml
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes/master/index.html
$ sed -i -e 's/^layout: post/layout: single/' _posts/*welcome-to-jekyll.markdown
$ jekyll serve

• note espacially the neeed to add theme: minimal-mistakes-jekyll to the supplied _config.yml. Without this it does not work.