metalsmith-mallet

A mallet is typically used to form sheet metal as well as for forcing tight-fitting parts together. The metalsmith-mallet plugin is used to force together Metalsmith and Jekyll or any other static site generator that uses Jekyll style posts.

I like the idea behind Metalsmith. It's simplicity and pluggable architecture is very alluring, but I am still a big fan of Jekyll, therefore I wanted an option to keep my posts unchanged so that I could use both of these tools to generate my blog.

Installation

Install using NPM.

npm install metalsmith-mallet

Or add to the package.json file.

"dependencies": {
  "metalsmith-mallet": "*"
}

Usage

It is very important to run metalsmith-mallet before any other plugins. Otherwise your posts might not be processed correctly.

CLI Usage

Install via npm and then add the metalsmith-mallet key to your metalsmith.json plugins.

{
  "plugins": {
    "metalsmith-mallet": true
  }
}

JavaScript Usage

var mallet     = require('metalsmith-mallet'),
    markdown   = require('metalsmith-markdown'),
    metalsmith = require('metalsmith');

Metalsmith(__dirname)
  .use(mallet())
  .use(markdown())
  .build();

Ignore option

In case there are any posts that you don't want to process with metalsmith-mallet, you can specify them using ignore option.

Metalsmith(__dirname)
    .use(mallet({ ignore: ["2014-04-05-random-post.md"] }))
    .use(markdown())
    .build();

Collection option

metalsmith-mallet makes it easier to use metalsmith-collections plugin without changing the metadata of your posts by adding a collection property. The default value is the same as layout, but you can change it using collection option.

Metalsmith(__dirname)
    .use(mallet({ collection: "articles" }))
    .use(markdown())
    .build();

jekyllStyleLayout option

metalsmith-mallet uses the jekyll layout: post syntax for layouts, adding a .html extension by default. You can override this behaviour by setting jekyllStyleLayout to false.

Metalsmith(__dirname)
    .use(mallet({ jekyllStyleLayout: false }))
    .use(markdown())
    .build();

In addition to properties defined in the YAML Front Matter metalsmith-mallet defines url and date, so in a Handlebars template you can do something like this:

<time>{{ date }}</time>
<h1><a href="{{ url }}" title="{{ title }}">{{ title }}</a></h1>

The value for the date is taken from the post's file name, therefore it has a format of yyyy-mm-dd. If you want to change the format, you should define a helper function for that. If you are using Handlebars, the helper function might look something like this.

Handlebars.registerHelper('localeDateFrom', function (dateString) {
    var date = new Date(dateString);

    return date.toLocaleDateString();
});

Then you can use this function in a template.

<time>{{localeDateFrom date}}</time>

TODO:

• Add an option to specify a different permalink format.

If you have any thoughts on this project, you can find me on Twitter as @aigarsdz.