blogman

#Blogman

Blogman is an easy-to-use blog engine made for node.js platform. You only need to write your articles/posts in markdown, put them in the posts folder and blogman will process them to be shown on your website.

This module is intended to be used in personal developers blogs. A working example can be seen in my blog. This blog engine is in alpha state because it still does not have all the desired features. Anyway, it is fully operational as it is right now.

##Requirements

Blogman depens on filemonitor-node, which depends on inotify-tools. To install inotify-tools on a Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) system:

sudo apt-get install inotify-tools

For installing on other linux flavors, go [here][getting-inotify-tools].

##Installation

Once inotify-tools is installed. On your project directory:

npm install blogman

##Usage

Blogman has two operation modes as described in the following sub-sections.

For using blogman with express, you just configure it passing the express application object. Also, you can pass an optional settings object as it is shown in the next example. Any setting not set in the settings object will take a default value. Default values are the same shown in the example, e.g. default encoding value is "utf8".

    var express = require('express'),
      blogman = require('blogman'),
      app = express.createServer();

    //... some express configuration code

    //Routes

    blogman.configure(app, {
      route: "/blog",
      blogdir: "./blog/",
      encoding: "utf8",
      postsPerPage: 5
    });
    //app.get...
    //Other routes

If you want to use default setting values, you could just invoke blogman.configure(app);. In the example, full method arguments were used for demostration purposes.

Assuming you use default settings as in the previous example. Postman will capture two routes:

• GET http://yoursite/blog(/:page)?
• GET http://youtsite/blog/post/:id

The first route is for showing your post list in a paginated way. The number of posts shown per page is defined by property postsPerPage. The second route will be used for accessing an specific article. For rendering these pages, blogman will use blog and blogpost views in your express project. These two views MUST exist.

Blogman will look for markdown files in the ./blog/posts/ folder. These files will be read using the defined encoding. They will be parsed and processed so they can be shown when they are requested.

A blogman example markdown file format is:

title: My First Post
author: John Doe
date: 01 May 2011 16:30:00 -0500

This is my first post for blogman blog engine.

Here there is another paragraph.

As you can see, blogman markdown files should have a special header with metadata for the post. It is recommended to use at least these three properties (title, author and date). Anyway, you could set any property you desire in the header like keywords or location. Header goes from the beginning of the file until the first blank line is found.

Notes:

• date is a very important property because posts are ordered using this criteria. Be careful to use a valid javascript date string format as in the example.
• There is an id property which uniquely identifies a post. It is set to be the filename without .markdown extension. Do NOT declare this property inside the file.
• Each time an article file is put in the ./blog/posts folder, it will be added to the website without doing anything else.

As stated previously, renderization is done using views blog and blogpost of the express project. blog is used when a list of posts is to be rendered and blogpost is used when only one post is going to be shown. In the latter case, the view will receive an object called post with all the properties in the header of the post. post also have a content property with the HTML of the post content. If using jade, a view could be like this:

    .blog-post
     .blog-post-title
       h2= post.title
       p by <b>#{post.author}</b> on #{post.date}
     .blog-post-content
       != post.content

For the blog view (list of posts) case, you will receive a posts array. Then, you could do:

    .content-title
      h1 Blog Articles
    .blog-list
      each post in posts
        .blog-li
          .blog-li-title
            h2
              a(href='/blog/post/#{post.id}')= post.title
            small= post.date
          .blog-li-preview
            != post.preview
          a.btn.btn-primary(href='/blog/post/#{post.id}') Read more...
    .pagination.pagination-centered
      ul
        - for(var i=1; i <= posts.pageCount; i++)
          if i!==posts.page
            li
              a(href='/blog/#{i}')= i
          else
            li.active
              a= i

In this example, you can see posts array has a page property to indicate the current page. Also, each element of the array has a preview which is an HTML fragment of the full post content.

In this mode, you can configure Blogman passing null instead of an application object. In this case Blogman interface exposes methods post(:id, callback(err, post)) and posts(:page, callback(err, posts) which will respectively return one and many posts objects so you can use them as you like. This objects are the same that would be passed to the views in the express integration mode.

    var blogman = require('blogman');
    blogman.configure(null);
    
    blogman.post('welcome', function(err, postData) {
      if(err) { return; };
      console.log(postData.title);
      console.log(postData.content);
    });

##ToDo As stated previously, Blogman in in alpha stage. Features planned to be added soon are:

• Automatic syntax highlighting.
• Support for comments.
• Support for RSS.
• Better layouts/views management support.