gulp-mvb

gulp-mvb is a gulp plugin for creating a minimum viable blog.

Dead simple blogging

It is made up of these parts which are connected to DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork(TM):

• Markdown for writing the articles
• YAML Front Matter for the article meta information
• Jade for the templates. This is optional and the library is supposed to work with other template languages as well, as long as they support gulp-data. I've only tested it with Jade, yet.
• Gulp to wire it together

In fact, this is the Octopress way of writing articles, which I really like. As I needed another foundation for building my site and blog, I decided to use this approach and create a gulp-plugin for it.

Conventions and assumptions

To keep it dead simple, here are the rules. Articles...

• are written in Markdown
• have this filename pattern: YYYY-MM-DD-ARTICLE_NAME.md (the YYYY-MM-DD- part is optional)
• meta data is defined via YAML Front Matter

Usage

Install with:

npm install gulp-mvb --save-dev

or

yarn add --dev gulp-mvb

Example

For a full featured example of all the things described below see my websites code.

Gulpfile

Here is the TL;DR for how to use gulp-mvb in your gulpfile:

import mvb from 'gulp-mvb';
import jade from 'gulp-jade';
import rename from 'gulp-rename';
import highlightjs from 'highlight.js';

const paths = {
  articles: ['src/articles/**/*.md'],
  feedTemplate: 'src/templates/atom.jade',
  articleTemplate: 'src/templates/article.jade',
  articlesBasepath: 'articles'
};

const mvbConf = {
  // glob that locates the article markdown files
  glob: paths.articles,
  // the template for an article page
  template: paths.articleTemplate,
  // optionally define custom markdown-it plugins
  plugins: [
    'markdown-it-mark',
    ['markdown-it-anchor', { permalink: false }]
  ],
  // callback function for generating an article permalink.
  // see docs below for info on the article properties.
  permalink(article) {
    return `/${paths.articlesBasepath}/${article.id}.html`;
  },
  // callback function to further modify an article after it has been loaded.
  loaded(article) {
    article.calculatedData = doSomething();
  },
  highlight(code, lang) {
    const languages = (lang != null) ? [lang] : undefined;
    return highlightjs.highlightAuto(code, languages).value;
  },
  // callback function for generating custom article groups.
  // access the return value via the groupedArticles property, so that you can
  // either return an array if you only have one group or return an object with
  // named groups in case you want to use multiple groups (by date, by tag, ...)
  grouping(articles) {
    const byYear = {};
    articles.forEach((article) => {
      let year = article.date.toISOString().replace(/-.*/, "");
      byYear[year] || (byYear[year] = []);
      return byYear[year].push(article);
    });
    return { byYear };
  }
}

gulp.task('articles', () =>
  gulp.src(paths.articles)
    .pipe(mvb(mvbConf))
    .pipe(jade())
    .pipe(gulp.dest(paths.articlesBasepath))
);

gulp.task('feed', () =>
  gulp.src(paths.feedTemplate)
    .pipe(mvb(mvbConf))
    .pipe(jade(pretty: true))
    .pipe(rename('atom.xml'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest())
);

See all of this in a broader context in my websites gulpfile.

The article object

The article object has the following properties, which can be used in the template and permalink function:

• id: In case this is not set via front matter, it will be inferred from the articles file name (second part after date)
• date: In case this is not set via front matter, it will be inferred from the articles file name (optional YYYY-MM-DD- part)
• permalink: Gets generated via the permalink function
• content: The rendered content (HTML)
• fileName: You might want to use this in the permalink callback function
• previousArticle: The previous/earlier article
• nextArticle: The next/later article
• description: If you use the Wordpress style <!-- more --> marker in your content, the description will be set with the text up to the marker. The marker will get replaced with <div id="more"></div> so you can link to it by appending the #more hash to the permalink.

In addition to these properties, you will also have access to the ones you defined in the article's frontmatter. To append further data, you can use the loaded callback function.

An article/blogpost

This is what a simple article with some frontmatter could look like:

---
title: Hello World
subtitle: Additional title
date: 2015-12-06
---

Here goes the markdown content that will be rendered as HTML...

Templates

Your articleTemplate might be something like:

extends layout

block main
  article
    header
      h1= mvb.article.title
      - if mvb.article.subtitle
        h2= mvb.article.subtitle
    != mvb.article.content
    footer
      | Posted on
      time= mvb.article.date

As you can see the article data will be available in your template via the namespaced variable mvb.article. This is to avoid collision of mvbs variables with other potential custom variables.

You can also use the mvb.articles list to generate an overview for all your articles or your feedTemplate (in this case atom):

doctype xml
feed(xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:base="https://example.org")
  id https://example.org/atom.xml
  title Example Atom Feed
  updated= mvb.articles[0].date.toISOString()
  link(href="/")
  link(rel="self" href="/atom.xml")
  for article in mvb.articles
    entry
      id= article.id
      title= article.title
      link(href=article.permalink)
      updated= article.date.toISOString()
      content(type="html")= article.content

Jade can be used to compile XML as shown above too, but it will always give the resulting file the .html extension. So you will need to rename the feed with gulp-rename.

You can also use the mvb.articles list to embed a list of your blogposts in your sites pages:

ul
  for article in mvb.articles
    li
      a(href=article.permalink)= article.title

In case you defined a grouping callback in your config, you can access the grouped articles via the mvb.groupedArticles property.

To have access to the mvb variables you will need to use .pipe(mvb(mvbConf)) in your gulp stream before rendering the templates.

License

MIT License