`zola serve` with Latest Zola Version (0.22.0) breaks

[kfc35]

What’s Wrong

Zola just came out with a new version, 0.22.0, and it seems to be incompatible with main repo.

zola serve with Zola Version (0.22.0) results in:

zola serve
Building site...
ERROR Failed to serve the site
ERROR TOML parse error at line 28, column 1
   |
28 | extra_syntaxes_and_themes = ["syntaxes"]
   | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
unknown field `extra_syntaxes_and_themes`, expected one of `highlighting`, `render_emoji`, `external_links_class`, `external_links_target_blank`, `external_links_no_follow`, `external_links_no_referrer`, `external_links_external`, `smart_punctuation`, `definition_list`, `bottom_footnotes`, `lazy_async_image`, `insert_anchor_links`, `github_alerts`

It seems the section under [markdown] in config.toml needs to be updated based on the changelog: https://github.com/getzola/zola/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#0220-2026-01-09

Possible solutions:

• Update the README to reflect that Zola must be <= 0.21.0.
• Write the necessary changes to config.toml (and possibly elsewhere) to be compatible with 0.22.0 and update the README to reflect the updated Zola version

Extra Context

PR with the breaking change: getzola/zola#3044

[alice-i-cecile]

Write the necessary changes to config.toml (and possibly elsewhere) to be compatible with 0.22.0 and update the README to reflect the updated Zola version

I'd prefer this if feasible :) Staying on an old version indefinitely sucks.

Adding a note to the README for now is a good bandaid though.

[Based-A]

From a brief investigation, updating the website to Zola 0.22.0 is pretty straightforward as only a couple of options in the config.toml file need to be updated. However, the update changed the syntax highlighter from Syntect to Giallo which now overrides the syntax theming for code blocks (along with breaking the RON syntax as well, although WGSL is natively supported). It doesn't look horrible, but it is noticeably less colorful and distinct.

Getting around the theming issue and fixing the RON syntax highlighting requires setting up a VSCode-like theme file and RON grammar file to be imported in the config.toml file. Not sure if there's a way to generate either of these files from what is currently being used, that's a bit out of my reach.

[kfc35]

I was looking into the RON grammar file issue and a grammar file for RON in the JSON format (the format now necessitated by the upgrade) exists in this repo: https://github.com/a5huynh/vscode-ron (the same repo used for the VS Code plugin, and is also based on the existing sublime-ron syntax file the website already uses). We can probably use that directly, although it may be nice for us to suggest Textmate, the grammars of which are used by Giallo, to support RON grammar (via PR?).

(How I got there: I was looking at the Giallo repo, which says that it uses curated grammars and themes from Textmate. Textmate says it will most likely support grammars in GitHub’s Linguist repo. Linguist does support grammar on GitHub for RON (search their vendor file for RON), which landed me on vscode-ron).

(I don’t have any answer to the theme-ing issue at the moment, but creating a theme file seems like the way to go if we want a bespoke theme. built in themes are available for view here: https://textmate-grammars-themes.netlify.app/ )

[kfc35]

I started the upstream RON syntax support process: shikijs/textmate-grammars-themes#173

I dunno how long that'll take to be accessible through Zola though so we dont have to wait for it

[Keats]

I dunno how long that'll take to be accessible through Zola though so we dont have to wait for it

You can just download the file and load it from the zola config file, no need to have it built-in giallo. Same for the themes if none of the ones built-in work for you, there should be enough in the VSCode ecosystem that you can find something you like.

[mockersf]

we're still using Zola 19 to build and deploy the website, so... no need to rush and add custom steps

it would still be nice to update

[ChristopherBiscardi]

I checked out upgrading today. The only thing we need to resolve is regaining our custom syntax highlighting in #2425

Anyone who wants to explore writing the vscode theme file should do so.