grunt-markdown-processor

1. Write a Markdown file with your content.
2. Write a lo-dash (Grunt) template that describes the resulting HTML.
3. Let this plugin generate the HTML files for you.

What is that good for?

Consider you have a number of similar pages you want to author content for. And you prefer writing them in Markdown and/or you're not an HTML person.

We got you covered.

Take this plugin and let some HTML savvy gal or guy write the code for you. Then run it through this plugin and it will generate tasty fresh HTML for ya!

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.1

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-md-templator --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-md-templator');

The "grunt-md-templator" task

Run this task with the grunt md_to_html command.

Task targets, files and options may be specified according to the Grunt Configuring tasks guide.

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named md_to_html to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

Options

template

Type: String

Path to the Grunt (Lo-Dash) template that will be usd to generate the HTML files.

id_pattern

Type: RegExp Default: /{(.+)}/

If you want your markdown sections to have a different id than that derived from the section title (by default the id will be the section title in lower case joined by '-') you can specify what regexp will the plugin look for. For example the default value will strip anything between curly braces and use that as the id.

tags

Type: Array of Strings Default: ['h1', 'h2', 'h3']

What sections do we want to look for when parsing. If not included here the resulting JS object will not contain the missing sections. By default anything less important than h3 will be contained within it's h3 parent.

pretty

Type: Boolean Default: false

Set to true if the resulting HTML should be pretty-printed.

Block support

Version 0.2.0 comes with experimental block support.

You can start a block by inserting a line like --- blockName --- preceded and followed by an empty line. Block ends when its parent section ends or when another block is found; see the test case for an example.

Blocks can be accessed via <section>.blocks attribute which is a hash containing data for block nodes (again, see the test for an example).

Accessing markdown data in the HTML template

Each "section" has the following data:

• id - the header id
• metadata - a hash containing whatever is in {} at the end of the header line (e.g. ## foo {{"bar": 42}} => section.metadata == {bar: 42}
• body - the HTML of the body of the section (please note that this does not include the HTML of the subsections)
• header - the HTML of the header of the section
• content - concatenated header and body
• html - sort of like jQuery's html() method; HTMLof the whole subtree (not including this section header).
• blocks - a has containing child blocks data for this section
• children - an array of child nodes for this section (including blocks)
• name - the name of the block if section is a block, null otherwise

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt.

Release History

• 2013-12-27   v0.1.0   Initial release.