Jekyll command to publish a draft

[zsiegel]

It would be great to have a command to publish a draft.

For example if you did jekyll publish _draft/path-to-draft.md it would move the file into your _posts folder and date it with the current date.

I would love to help implement the feature but I cannot seem to get jekyll to build on my machine.

When trying to build I get the following error. I might be totally missing something but any nudge in the right direction or quick steps to building and iterating would be great.

(master)$ jekyll build --trace /Users/zsiegel/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/commander-4.1.5/lib/commander/runner.rb:365:in block in require_program': program version required (Commander::Runner::CommandError)`

Thanks!

[courajs]

I was just thinking the same thing. It does feel to me like a natural extension of the drafts feature.

[parkr]

Great idea!

That error is usually due to a Syntax Error. Within your fork, run bundle exec rake console or, if that doesn't work, bundle exec irb -r lib/jekyll.rb and the error should show itself. Commander uses a lot of metaprogramming that swallows this.

[parkr]

@benbalter @mattr- what do you think of this?

[zsiegel]

@parkr thanks for your help i was able to track down the issues and it seems to be building and running the tests now. Ill try and hack around this weekend and see what I can come up with.

[mattr-]

I like it. When could we see some code? 😃

On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Zac Siegel notifications@github.comwrote:

@parkr https://github.com/parkr thanks for your help i was able to
track down the issues and it seems to be building and running the tests
now. Ill try and hack around this weekend and see what I can come up with.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/1469#issuecomment-23504023
.

[benbalter]

I've been giving this some thought, and I've actually started to open an issue several times called "deprecate drafts", but haven't gone through with it. I think drafts as a feature encourage the wrong workflow. The command to publish a draft should be git merge feature-branch.

The amazing thing about Jekyll is that it treats content as code. It wraps your code in the same satin blanket that is GIt as geeks do with the software they use to publish that same content, and that makes a heck of a lot of sense. After all, the content is the important part, not the platform.

Geeks care about code, and if so much as a single line is off, things break. That's why we have great tools, and that's why applying that workflow and that philosophy to content is so powerful.

The draft feature breaks that flow. It says hey, even though we have this amazing tooling that allows us to create parallel versions, save them, version them, expose them early on for feedback from others... lets ignore all that and invent our own system to stage content. We don't do that with code, we shouldn't do that with text.

Here's how a draft flow should work if we want to encourage flow:

1. git checkout -b descriptive-name
2. touch _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-descriptive-name.md
3. $EDITOR _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-descriptive-name.md
4. git add _posts
5. git commit _posts
6. [a pull request if working with others]
7. git checkout master && git merge descriptive-name

That process isn't for everyone, but we can build tooling to fix that. What if jekyll draft foo did step 1-3. What if jekyll publish foo did steps 4-7. What if we encouraged our users to use an established, but significantly more evolved workflow, rather than building our own from scratch.

Caveat: This assumes you're using git, which up until now, Jekyll does not. We'd either want to make that assumption, or have a non-git fallback to the existing workflow.

[courajs]

I think that wouldn't enable the 'browse your drafts, and see which you feel like developing a bit more' kind of workflow which it currently encourages. I think that's kind of what it's built around.

[mattr-]

@benbalter Great thoughts. Seems so simple now that you mention it. 😃

With Ben's example, you'd have a different feature branch for each draft.
Browsing your drafts becomes a simple git branch. @FellowMD Would that
address your workflow issues?

[courajs]

If I had to switch one by one between drafts that would ruin the feature for me. There's something about having them all displayed next to each other that helps you realize which one should see the light of day next.
Like this: http://obtvse.herokuapp.com/admin
(username:username, password:password)

[parkr]

Whoa whoa hold your 🐴! We can't assume everyone uses Git (as Ben mentioned) and I'd feel really uncomfortable about integrating git with Jekyll so tightly. It's enforcing a workflow that isn't flexible – what if I work in a different way? I'll submit a PR to modify the workflow or never use this feature.

Integrating git is a can of worms I don't want to open. All we want is an automated way to move a file from _drafts to _posts and to give it that moment's date. Doing anything more is locking us and our users into a certain way of working and this project doesn't seem to be about that at all.

The idea is brilliant and the workflow certainly works for some, but I don't think it's within the domain of Jekyll to enforce this. It's more in the domain of Octopress than Jekyll.

[zsiegel]

I kind of agree with Parker. I was thinking about a basic command that would move and date the draft appropriately. Obviously I could do this with shell scripting or other methods on my local machine but I thought it might be a nice extension to the drafts functionality.

Within the git workflow Ben mentioned I could see the following…

• git branch my-draft-branch
• jekyll publish _drafts/path-to-draft.md
• git commit & Push

[mattr-]

Nobody ever said we would be integrating Git in to Jekyll or enforcing a workflow. We're just having a discussion about workflows. Let's calm down, shall we? 😃

Do I think using git to manage your workflow makes sense? Sure I do, so I'll make it my workflow and not force it on any one else.

Ultimately, Jekyll's workflow is based around having a particular directory structure and putting things in the appropriate buckets in that structure. That's it. Whether or not we have helpers for that in Jekyll core is a discussion we need to have.

[courajs]

Whether or not we have helpers for that in Jekyll core is a discussion we need to have

👍

[benbalter]

@parkr agree with everything you're saying, and that's why I caveated that any tooling can't exclusively assume git, but one word of caution:

It's enforcing a workflow that isn't flexible... locking us and our users into a certain way of working

(setting aside the fact that regardless of implementation a draft command would be opt in and in no way exclusive), that's exactly what we're doing here by adding this command. There's going to be a workflow behind it either way. I'm just asking if we're building towards the best workflow.

Tooling and defaults are more powerful than you think. We're building Jekyll around a certain workflow as is. That workflow involves a _drafts folder, and moving files around. If I'm a new user and I go to docs and ask "what's the best way to draft a Jekyll post", and it says, don't bother with anything that's established, we've got our own way of doing things... that's setting forward a particular workflow.

A draft command would be additional tooling and would go a long way to set a standard workflow in a way that hasn't been done to date... I was simply asking not if that's a viable workflow, or lowest-common-denominator workflow, but if that's the best workflow that we can imagine, and if that's what we want to be making the default.

Yes, we can't assume Git (although I'd argue 80%+ of the time that's how Jekyll's managed) , but I'd rather build against the ideal workflow, and fall back when we have to, not settle for second best because it's what we've done in the past.

[doktorbro]

I've been giving this some thought, and I've actually started to open an issue several times called "deprecate drafts", but haven't gone through with it. I think drafts as a feature encourage the wrong workflow.

I agree 100 %. Git has already everything.

Jekyll’s draft feature is build for one-man-blogs of day dreamers who start 100 posts and never finish them. It’s not really multi-user ready.

BTW, the draft feature was forced 8 months ago by @scribu, the Wordpress guy. It’s a implementation of the Wordpress staging workflow, I always hated. How many people really use this feature since it’s introduced?

The fact it’s for posts only just shows how unnecessary draft is. Look at Jekyll’s documentation. It’s built with pages, not posts. Different contributors start new pages, make pull requests, get things done. There are drafts git branches for every type of page. It works without draft.