Plank

A tiny static site generator in Perl.

• bin/cc: 49sloc
• bin/new: 32sloc

3 dependencies though.

Getting Started

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/ocku/plank.git

Install the dependencies

cpan YAML::Tiny Template::Liquid Text::MultiMarkdown

Make your first post

make post title="Hello World!"

Build

make

And that's it! The compiled site will be written to the .dist directory.

Template System

Plank uses Liquid for a "double compilation" process. The www file is compiled first, and its compiled content is added to the site.content metadata key, which the frame can then access along with the rest of the metadata when it is also compiled.

Basically, you can use liquid in the frame and in the file to be compiled and placed in the frame.

Folder Structure

• bin contains the executables used by make
• frame contains the frames (templates) used in the compilation process
• static contains static files to be copied to .dist after the compilation process ends.
• www contains everything to be compiled (from MD to HTML).

Special Properties

site.computed cannot be set by the user, and it can only be accessed in the template.

Indexing

Note: As of now there is no support for pagination

You can create and use as many indices as you like in a single file by defining the index property in the file's metadata.

Consider this example from www/index.md:

---
title: hi
index:
  # the name to be used to access this index in the
  # template.
  - name: posts

    # this pattern is matched on the same working directory
    # as the file being compiled.
    # given a folder structure as follows:
    #
    # my/
    #   dir/
    #       file_being_compiled.md
    #       dir2/file_to_index.md
    #
    # the pattern to access
    # file_to_index.md from file_being_compiled.md
    # would simply be dir2/* or ./dir2/*
    glob: posts/*.md

    # (optional) sort by a metadata field of the files
    # being indexed. must be numeric!
    sort_by:
      date

      # (optional) slice the results from the
      # [(start)th] to the [(end)th], given
      # `slice: [start, end]`
      #
      # defaults to [0, 10], and if only given one number,
      # it will be set as the higher limit.
      #
      # for example in this case, [10] becomes [0, 10].
    slice:
      - 10
---

This definition gives the template access to the metadata of all files that match the glob, which is accessible through the index.{name} property of site.computed. See the example below, also from www/index.md:

## Posts

{% for item in site.computed.index.posts %}
{% assign time = item.date | date: "%Y-%m-%d" %}

- <time datetime="{{time}}">{{time}}</time>: [{{item.title}}]({{item.url}})

{% endfor %}