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Gemican considers "articles" to be chronological content, such as posts on a blog, and thus associated with a date.
The idea behind "pages" is that they are usually not temporal in nature and are used for content that does not change very often (e.g., "About" or "Contact" pages).
You can find sample content in the repository at `samples/content/`.
Content can either be authored directly in Gemtext, or using Markdown syntax (with a file ending in `.md`, `.markdown`, `.mkd`, or `.mdown`). Markdown generation requires that you first explicitly install the md2gemini[1] package, which can be done via `pip install md2gemini`.
Gemican tries to be smart enough to get the information it needs from the file system (for instance, about the category of your articles), but some information you need to provide in the form of metadata inside your files.
Metadata should be included using the following syntax in both Gemtext and Markdown formatted files:
Title: My super title Date: 2010-12-03 10:20 Modified: 2010-12-05 19:30 Category: Python Tags: gemican, publishing Slug: my-super-post Authors: Alexis Metaireau, Conan Doyle Summary: Short version for index and feeds This is the content of my super blog post.
Author and tag lists may be semicolon-separated instead, which allows you to write authors and tags containing commas:
Tags: gemican, publishing tool; gemican, bird Authors: Metaireau, Alexis; Doyle, Conan
You can also have your own metadata keys (so long as they don't conflict with reserved metadata keywords) for use in your templates. The following table contains a list of reserved metadata keywords:
=============== ===============================================================
Metadata Description
=============== ===============================================================
`title` Title of the article or page
`date` Publication date (e.g., `YYYY-MM-DD HH:SS`)
`modified` Modification date (e.g., `YYYY-MM-DD HH:SS`)
`tags` Content tags, separated by commas
`keywords` Content keywords, separated by commas (HTML content only)
`category` Content category (one only — not multiple)
`slug` Identifier used in URLs and translations
`author` Content author, when there is only one
`authors` Content authors, when there are multiple
`summary` Brief description of content for index pages
`lang` Content language ID (`en`, `fr`, etc.)
`translation` If content is a translation of another (`true` or `false`)
`status` Content status: `draft`, `hidden`, or `published`
`template` Name of template to use to generate content (without extension)
`save_as` Save content to this relative file path
`url` URL to use for this article/page
=============== ===============================================================
Readers for additional formats could be implemented via plugins[2].
Note that, aside from the title, none of this content metadata is mandatory: if the date is not specified and `DEFAULT_DATE` is set to `'fs'`, Gemican will rely on the file's "mtime" timestamp, and the category can be determined by the directory in which the file resides. For example, a file located at `python/foobar/myfoobar.rst` will have a category of `foobar`. If you would like to organize your files in other ways where the name of the subfolder would not be a good category name, you can set the setting `USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY` to `False`. When parsing dates given in the page metadata, Gemican supports the W3C's suggested subset ISO 8601.
So the title is the only required metadata. If that bothers you, worry not. Instead of manually specifying a title in your metadata each time, you can use the source content file name as the title. For example, a Markdown source file named `Publishing via Gemican.md` would automatically be assigned a title of *Publishing via Gemican*. If you would prefer this behavior, add the following line to your settings file:
FILENAME_METADATA = '(?P<title>.*)'
When experimenting with different settings (especially the metadata ones) caching may interfere and the changes may not be visible. In such cases disable caching with `LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE = False` or use the `--ignore-cache` command-line switch.
`modified` should be last time you updated the article, and defaults to `date` if not specified. Besides you can show `modified` in the templates, feed entries in feed readers will be updated automatically when you set `modified` to the current date after you modified your article.
`authors` is a comma-separated list of article authors. If there's only one author you can use `author` field.
If you do not explicitly specify summary metadata for a given post, the `SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH` setting can be used to specify how many words from the beginning of an article are used as the summary.
You can also extract any metadata from the filename through a regular expression to be set in the `FILENAME_METADATA` setting. All named groups that are matched will be set in the metadata object. The default value for the `FILENAME_METADATA` setting will only extract the date from the filename. For example, if you would like to extract both the date and the slug, you could set something like: `'(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'`
Please note that the metadata available inside your files takes precedence over the metadata extracted from the filename.
If you create a folder named `pages` inside the content folder, all the files in it will be used to generate static pages, such as **About** or **Contact** pages. (See example filesystem layout below.)
You can use the `DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU` setting to control whether all those pages are displayed in the primary navigation menu. (Default is `True`.)
If you want to exclude any pages from being linked to or listed in the menu then add a `status: hidden` attribute to its metadata. This is useful for things like making error pages that fit the generated theme of your site.
Static files are files other than articles and pages that are copied to the output folder as-is, without processing. You can control which static files are copied over with the `STATIC_PATHS` setting of the project's `gemicanconf.py` file. Gemican's default configuration includes the `images` directory for this, but others must be added manually. In addition, static files that are explicitly linked to are included (see below).
Static files can safely share a source directory with page source files, without exposing the page sources in the generated site. Any such directory must be added to both `STATIC_PATHS` and `PAGE_PATHS` (or `STATIC_PATHS` and `ARTICLE_PATHS`). Gemican will identify and process the page source files normally, and copy the remaining files as if they lived in a separate directory reserved for static files.
Note: Placing static and content source files together in the same source directory does not guarantee that they will end up in the same place in the generated site. The easiest way to do this is by using the `{attach}` link syntax (described below). Alternatively, the `STATIC_SAVE_AS`, `PAGE_SAVE_AS`, and `ARTICLE_SAVE_AS` settings (and the corresponding `*_URL` settings) can be configured to place files of different types together, just as they could in earlier versions of Gemican.
It is possible to specify intra-site links to files in the *source content* hierarchy instead of files in the *generated* hierarchy. This makes it easier to link from the current post to other content that may be sitting alongside that post (instead of having to determine where the other content will be placed after site generation).
To link to internal content (files in the `content` directory), use the following syntax for the link target: `{filename}path/to/file` Note: forward slashes, `/`, are the required path separator in the `{filename}` directive on all operating systems, including Windows.
For example, a Gemican project might be structured like this:
website/ ├── content │ ├── category/ │ │ └── article1.md │ ├── article2.md │ └── pages │ └── about.md └── gemican.conf.py
In this example, `article1.md` could look like this:
Title: The first article
Date: 2012-12-01 10:02
See below intra-site link examples.
[a link relative to the current file]({filename}../article2.md)
[a link relative to the content root]({filename}/article2.md)
and `article2.md`:
Title: The second article
Date: 2012-12-01 10:02
See below intra-site link examples in Markdown format.
[a link relative to the current file]({filename}category/article1.md)
[a link relative to the content root]({filename}/category/article1.md)
You can link to static content using `{static}path/to/file`. Files linked to with this syntax will automatically be copied to the output directory, even if the source directories containing them are not included in the `STATIC_PATHS` setting of the project's `gemicanconf.py` file.
For example, a project's content directory might be structured like this:
content ├── images │ └── han.jpg ├── pdfs │ └── menu.pdf └── pages └── test.md
`test.md` would include:
[Our Menu]({static}/pdfs/menu.pdf)
Site generation would then copy `han.jpg` to `output/images/han.jpg`, `menu.pdf` to `output/pdfs/menu.pdf`, and write the appropriate links in `test.md`.
If you use `{static}` to link to an article or a page, this will be turned into a link to its source code.
Starting with Gemican 3.5, static files can be "attached" to a page or article using this syntax for the link target: `{attach}path/to/file` This works like the `{static}` syntax, but also relocates the static file into the linking document's output directory. If the static file originates from a subdirectory beneath the linking document's source, that relationship will be preserved on output. Otherwise, it will become a sibling of the linking document.
This only works for linking to static files.
For example, a project's content directory might be structured like this:
content
├── blog
│ ├── icons
│ │ └── icon.png
│ ├── photo.jpg
│ └── testpost.md
└── downloads
└── archive.zip
`gemicanconf.py` would include:
PATH = 'content'
ARTICLE_PATHS = ['blog']
ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = '{date:%Y}/{slug}.html'
ARTICLE_URL = '{date:%Y}/{slug}.html'
`testpost.md` would include:
Title: Test Post
Category: test
Date: 2014-10-31
[Downloadable File]({attach}/downloads/archive.zip)
Site generation would then produce an output directory structured like this:
output
└── 2014
├── archive.zip
├── icons
│ └── icon.png
├── photo.jpg
└── test-post.html
Notice that all the files linked using `{attach}` ended up in or beneath the article's output directory.
If a static file is linked multiple times, the relocating feature of `{attach}` will only work in the first of those links to be processed. After the first link, Gemican will treat `{attach}` like `{static}`. This avoids breaking the already-processed links.
When using `{attach}`, any parent directory in `*_URL` / `*_SAVE_AS` settings should match each other. See also: url-settings
You can link to authors, categories, index and tags using the `{author}name`, `{category}foobar`, `{index}` and `{tag}tagname` syntax.
It is possible to import your site from WordPress, Tumblr, Dotclear, and RSS feeds using a simple script. See import[3].
It is possible to translate articles. To do so, you need to add a `lang` meta attribute to your articles/pages and set a `DEFAULT_LANG` setting (which is English [en] by default). With those settings in place, only articles with the default language will be listed, and each article will be accompanied by a list of available translations for that article.
This core Gemican functionality does not create sub-sites (e.g. `example.com/de`) with translated templates for each language.
By default, Gemican uses the article's URL "slug" to determine if two or more articles are translations of one another. (This can be changed with the `ARTICLE_TRANSLATION_ID` setting.) The slug can be set manually in the file's metadata; if not set explicitly, Gemican will auto-generate the slug from the title of the article.
Here is an example of two articles, one in English and the other in French.
The English article:
Title: Foobar is not dead slug: foobar-is-not-dead lang: en That's true, foobar is still alive!
And the French version:
Title: Foobar n'est pas mort ! slug: foobar-is-not-dead lang: fr Oui oui, foobar est toujours vivant !
Post content quality notwithstanding, you can see that only item in common between the two articles is the slug, which is functioning here as an identifier. If you'd rather not explicitly define the slug this way, you must then instead ensure that the translated article titles are identical, since the slug will be auto-generated from the article title.
If you do not want the original version of one specific article to be detected by the `DEFAULT_LANG` setting, use the `translation` metadata to specify which posts are translations:
Title: Foobar is not dead slug: foobar-is-not-dead lang: en translation: true That's true, foobar is still alive!
If you want to publish an article or a page as a draft (for friends to review before publishing, for example), you can add a `Status: draft` attribute to its metadata. That article will then be output to the `drafts` folder and not listed on the index page nor on any category or tag page.
If your articles should be automatically published as a draft (to not accidentally publish an article before it is finished) include the status in the `DEFAULT_METADATA`:
DEFAULT_METADATA = {
'status': 'draft',
}
To publish a post when the default status is `draft`, update the post's metadata to include `Status: published`.
Like pages, posts can also be marked as `hidden` with the `Status: hidden` attribute. Hidden posts will be output to `ARTICLE_SAVE_AS` as expected, but are not included by default in tag or category indexes, nor in the main article feed. This has the effect of creating an "unlisted" post.
1: https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/md2gemini
2: {filename}/pages/plugins.md