This is a Middleman template I have built for myself. It has support for:
- Zurb Foundation 5 or later;
- Font Awesome 4.0.3;
- blogging (through the middleman-blog gem);
- syntax highlighting (through the middleman-syntax gem);
- Disqus;
- Classic and Universal Google Analytics;
- MathJax.
- Git!
- Ruby 1.9+ (tested with Ruby 2.x).
- Bower.
First, install Bundler if you haven't done so already:
gem install bundler
To create a self-contained project (with everything included inside the project directory):
git clone http://github.com/lifepillar/middleman-by-lifepillar my-project
cd my-project
bundle install
bower install
bundle install will update all the gems.
bower install will create a directory called bower_components, containing Foundation's files.
Then, to build and serve your web site:
bundle exec middleman build
bundle exec middleman server
Alternatively, if you already have Middleman installed globally, you may add this template inside ~/.middleman with:
git clone http://github.com/lifepillar/middleman-by-lifepillar ~/.middleman/middleman-by-lifepillar
After that, you can create a project with:
middleman init my-project --template=middleman-by-lifepillar
cd my-project
bower install
To upgrade the installed gems execute this command inside the project root directory:
bundle update
To upgrade Foundation:
bower update
One thing you may want to set in config.rb is the Time.zone. Then, you should edit the site metadata in the data folder. The project contains sample pages adapted from Zurb Foundation's templates (Workspace and Blog). You may use them as a starting point to develop your site.
Site metadata (site title, slogan, author, etc…) and menu data are kept in YAML files in the data folder. For example, to add a link to the main menu, just add a title/link pair to main_menu.yml.
In the frontmatter of any page, you may use the variables head, beginbody, and endbody
to load additional partials, just before the </head> tag, just after <body>, and just before </body>, respectively.
For example, for a page that includes MathJax, Disqus comments and Google Analytics, your frontmatter might look like this:
---
title: My Page
head: [mathjax]
endbody: [disqus, analytics]
---
Each variable takes a list of names of partials, which must exist in the partials folder. You may
use your own partials in the same way. Of course, for a bunch of pages having the same structure,
it is better to define a custom layout. See, for instance, the mathjax.erb layout in the layouts folder.
To create a new post, type
bundle exec middleman article '<title>'
and edit the generated file. The default author's name for blog posts (as well as the blog's title and slogan) can be set in blog.yml. To override the default author for a specific post, add an author: <name> key to that post's frontmatter. This information is correctly exported to the XML feed.
If you do not need a blog, comment out or delete the following section in config.rb:
activate :blog do |blog|
...
end
and add the following line instead
ignore "blog/*"
Then, edit main.css.scss and comment out or delete
@import "blog";