Plankton - a static blog generator for node

Plankton uses markdown files as source and EJS templates for layout.

Getting started

Install using NPM:

$ npm install -g plankton

Blog posts are markdown files which contain a YAML front-matter. For example:

---
title: Ipsum
author: Kishore Nallan
date: January 26, 2013
published: true
layout: post
---

This is *some* text. First para here.

Second para is _right_ here!

The YAML front-matter allows you to define the following post-level properties:

• title - The title of the post. Note that this is NOT used to generate the URL slug. The URL slug is generated using the original name of the markdown file.
• author - Author of the post.
• date - The date the blog post was written.
• published - Set this to false if you don't want to publish a post (e.g. if it's still in a draft form).

Place your markdown files in a _posts folder and your EJS template files in a _layouts folder. A EJS template itself can contain a YAML font-matter that specifies a parent template. For example:

---
layout: wrapper
---
<h1>Post page</h1>
<h2><%= post.title %></h2>
<%- post.body %>

The EJS template has access to the following template variables:

• posts - An array of all posts parsed from the _posts directory.
• post - The actual post. post.body contains the post text and post.title contains the title of the post. You can also access all other properties specified in the YAML front-matter as properties of the post object.
• content - If a template file specifies another template as a layout, the referred layout file get the contents of the subview as the content template variable.

RSS Feed

Plankton generates a feed.xml file at the root of your published site. Be sure to set the following properties in _config.js, as they are used as part of the feed:

• BLOG_URL
• BLOG_TITLE
• BLOG_DESCRIPTION

Publishing the site

To publish the site, call plankton from the command-line:

$ plankton --src=./example --dest=./out

Check out the the /example folder to see a bare-bones example.

Todo

• Pagination
• Tags