Writing content
***************


Articles and pages
==================

Pelican considers "articles" to be chronological content, such as
posts on a blog, and thus associated with a date.

The idea behind "pages" is that they are usually not temporal in
nature and are used for content that does not change very often (e.g.,
"About" or "Contact" pages).

You can find sample content in the repository at "samples/content/".


File metadata
=============

Pelican tries to be smart enough to get the information it needs from
the file system (for instance, about the category of your articles),
but some information you need to provide in the form of metadata
inside your files.

If you are writing your content in reStructuredText format, you can
provide this metadata in text files via the following syntax (give
your file the ".rst" extension):

   My super title
   ##############

   :date: 2010-10-03 10:20
   :modified: 2010-10-04 18:40
   :tags: thats, awesome
   :category: yeah
   :slug: my-super-post
   :authors: Alexis Metaireau, Conan Doyle
   :summary: Short version for index and feeds

Author and tag lists may be semicolon-separated instead, which allows
you to write authors and tags containing commas:

   :tags: pelican, publishing tool; pelican, bird
   :authors: Metaireau, Alexis; Doyle, Conan

Pelican implements an extension to reStructuredText to enable support
for the "abbr" HTML tag. To use it, write something like this in your
post:

   This will be turned into :abbr:`HTML (HyperText Markup Language)`.

You can also use Markdown syntax (with a file ending in ".md",
".markdown", ".mkd", or ".mdown"). Markdown generation requires that
you first explicitly install the Python-Markdown package, which can be
done via "pip install Markdown".

Pelican also supports Markdown Extensions, which might have to be
installed separately if they are not included in the default
"Markdown" package and can be configured and loaded via the "MARKDOWN"
setting.

Metadata syntax for Markdown posts should follow this pattern:

   Title: My super title
   Date: 2010-12-03 10:20
   Modified: 2010-12-05 19:30
   Category: Python
   Tags: pelican, publishing
   Slug: my-super-post
   Authors: Alexis Metaireau, Conan Doyle
   Summary: Short version for index and feeds

   This is the content of my super blog post.

You can also have your own metadata keys (so long as they don't
conflict with reserved metadata keywords) for use in your templates.
The following table contains a list of reserved metadata keywords:

+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Metadata        | Description                                                       |
|=================|===================================================================|
| "title"         | Title of the article or page                                      |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "date"          | Publication date (e.g., "YYYY-MM-DD HH:SS")                       |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "modified"      | Modification date (e.g., "YYYY-MM-DD HH:SS")                      |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "tags"          | Content tags, separated by commas                                 |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "keywords"      | Content keywords, separated by commas (HTML content only)         |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "category"      | Content category (one only — not multiple)                        |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "slug"          | Identifier used in URLs and translations                          |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "author"        | Content author, when there is only one                            |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "authors"       | Content authors, when there are multiple                          |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "summary"       | Brief description of content for index pages                      |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "lang"          | Content language ID ("en", "fr", etc.)                            |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "translation"   | If content is a translation of another ("true" or "false")        |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "status"        | Content status: "draft", "hidden", "skip", or "published"         |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "template"      | Name of template to use to generate content (without extension)   |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "save_as"       | Save content to this relative file path                           |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "url"           | URL to use for this article/page                                  |
+-----------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

Readers for additional formats (such as AsciiDoc) are available via
plugins, which you can find via the Pelican Plugins collection as well
as the legacy pelican-plugins repository.

Pelican can also process HTML files ending in ".html" and ".htm".
Pelican interprets the HTML in a very straightforward manner, reading
metadata from "meta" tags, the title from the "title" tag, and the
body out from the "body" tag:

   <html>
       <head>
           <title>My super title</title>
           <meta name="tags" content="thats, awesome" />
           <meta name="date" content="2012-07-09 22:28" />
           <meta name="modified" content="2012-07-10 20:14" />
           <meta name="category" content="yeah" />
           <meta name="authors" content="Alexis Métaireau, Conan Doyle" />
           <meta name="summary" content="Short version for index and feeds" />
       </head>
       <body>
           This is the content of my super blog post.
       </body>
   </html>

With HTML, there is one simple exception to the standard metadata:
tags can be specified either via the "tags" metadata, as is standard
in Pelican, or via the "keywords" metadata, as is standard in HTML.
The two can be used interchangeably.

Note that, aside from the title, none of this content metadata is
mandatory: if the date is not specified and "DEFAULT_DATE" is set to
"'fs'", Pelican will rely on the file's "mtime" timestamp, and the
category can be determined by the directory in which the file resides.
For example, a file located at "python/foobar/myfoobar.rst" will have
a category of "foobar". If you would like to organize your files in
other ways where the name of the subfolder would not be a good
category name, you can set the setting "USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY" to
"False".  When parsing dates given in the page metadata, Pelican
supports the W3C's suggested subset ISO 8601.

So the title is the only required metadata. If that bothers you, worry
not. Instead of manually specifying a title in your metadata each
time, you can use the source content file name as the title. For
example, a Markdown source file named "Publishing via Pelican.md"
would automatically be assigned a title of *Publishing via Pelican*.
If you would prefer this behavior, add the following line to your
settings file:

   FILENAME_METADATA = '(?P<title>.*)'

Note:

  When experimenting with different settings (especially the metadata
  ones) caching may interfere and the changes may not be visible. In
  such cases disable caching with "LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE = False" or use
  the "--ignore-cache" command-line switch.

"modified" should be last time you updated the article, and defaults
to "date" if not specified. Besides you can show "modified" in the
templates, feed entries in feed readers will be updated automatically
when you set "modified" to the current date after you modified your
article.

"authors" is a comma-separated list of article authors. If there's
only one author you can use "author" field.

If you do not explicitly specify summary metadata for a given post,
the "SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH" setting can be used to specify how many words
from the beginning of an article are used as the summary. You can also
use an article's first N paragraphs as its summary using the
"SUMMARY_MAX_PARAGRAPHS" setting. If both settings are in use, the
specified number of paragraphs will be used but may be truncated to
respect the specified maximum length.

You can also extract any metadata from the filename through a regular
expression to be set in the "FILENAME_METADATA" setting. All named
groups that are matched will be set in the metadata object. The
default value for the "FILENAME_METADATA" setting will only extract
the date from the filename. For example, if you would like to extract
both the date and the slug, you could set something like:
"'(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'"

Please note that the metadata available inside your files takes
precedence over the metadata extracted from the filename.


Pages
=====

If you create a folder named "pages" inside the content folder, all
the files in it will be used to generate static pages, such as
**About** or **Contact** pages. (See example filesystem layout below.)

You can use the "DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU" setting to control whether all
those pages are displayed in the primary navigation menu. (Default is
"True".)

If you want to exclude any pages from being linked to or listed in the
menu, then add a "status: hidden" attribute to its metadata. This is
useful for things like making error pages that fit the generated theme
of your site.


Static content
==============

Static files are files other than articles and pages that are copied
to the output folder as-is, without processing. You can control which
static files are copied over with the "STATIC_PATHS" setting of the
project's "pelicanconf.py" file. Pelican's default configuration
includes the "images" directory for this, but others must be added
manually. In addition, static files that are explicitly linked to are
included (see below).

Note:

  In the default configuration, all files with a valid content file
  suffix (".html", ".rst", ".md", ...) get processed by the article
  and page generators *before* the static generator. This is avoided
  by altering the "*_EXCLUDE" settings appropriately.


Mixed content in the same directory
-----------------------------------

Starting with Pelican 3.5, static files can safely share a source
directory with page source files, without exposing the page sources in
the generated site. Any such directory must be added to both
"STATIC_PATHS" and "PAGE_PATHS" (or "STATIC_PATHS" and
"ARTICLE_PATHS"). Pelican will identify and process the page source
files normally, and copy the remaining files as if they lived in a
separate directory reserved for static files.

Note: Placing static and content source files together in the same
source directory does not guarantee that they will end up in the same
place in the generated site. The easiest way to do this is by using
the "{attach}" link syntax (described below). Alternatively, the
"STATIC_SAVE_AS", "PAGE_SAVE_AS", and "ARTICLE_SAVE_AS" settings (and
the corresponding "*_URL" settings) can be configured to place files
of different types together, just as they could in earlier versions of
Pelican.


Linking to internal content
===========================

From Pelican 3.1 onwards, it is now possible to specify intra-site
links to files in the *source content* hierarchy instead of files in
the *generated* hierarchy. This makes it easier to link from the
current post to other content that may be sitting alongside that post
(instead of having to determine where the other content will be placed
after site generation).

To link to internal content (files in the "content" directory), use
the following syntax for the link target: "{filename}path/to/file".
Note: forward slashes, "/", are the required path separator in the
"{filename}" directive on all operating systems, including Windows.

For example, a Pelican project might be structured like this:

   website/
   ├── content
   │   ├── category/
   │   │   └── article1.rst
   │   ├── article2.md
   │   └── pages
   │       └── about.md
   └── pelican.conf.py

In this example, "article1.rst" could look like this:

   The first article
   #################

   :date: 2012-12-01 10:02

   See below intra-site link examples in reStructuredText format.

   `a link relative to the current file <{filename}../article2.md>`_
   `a link relative to the content root <{filename}/article2.md>`_

and "article2.md":

   Title: The second article
   Date: 2012-12-01 10:02

   See below intra-site link examples in Markdown format.

   [a link relative to the current file]({filename}category/article1.rst)
   [a link relative to the content root]({filename}/category/article1.rst)


Linking to static files
-----------------------

You can link to static content using "{static}path/to/file". Files
linked to with this syntax will automatically be copied to the output
directory, even if the source directories containing them are not
included in the "STATIC_PATHS" setting of the project's
"pelicanconf.py" file.

For example, a project's content directory might be structured like
this:

   content
   ├── images
   │   └── han.jpg
   ├── pdfs
   │   └── menu.pdf
   └── pages
       └── test.md

"test.md" would include:

   ![Alt Text]({static}/images/han.jpg)
   [Our Menu]({static}/pdfs/menu.pdf)

Site generation would then copy "han.jpg" to "output/images/han.jpg",
"menu.pdf" to "output/pdfs/menu.pdf", and write the appropriate links
in "test.md".

If you use "{static}" to link to an article or a page, this will be
turned into a link to its source code.


Attaching static files
----------------------

Starting with Pelican 3.5, static files can be "attached" to a page or
article using this syntax for the link target: "{attach}path/to/file".
This works like the "{static}" syntax, but also relocates the static
file into the linking document's output directory. If the static file
originates from a subdirectory beneath the linking document's source,
that relationship will be preserved on output. Otherwise, it will
become a sibling of the linking document.

This only works for linking to static files.

For example, a project's content directory might be structured like
this:

   content
   ├── blog
   │   ├── icons
   │   │   └── icon.png
   │   ├── photo.jpg
   │   └── testpost.md
   └── downloads
       └── archive.zip

"pelicanconf.py" would include:

   PATH = 'content'
   ARTICLE_PATHS = ['blog']
   ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = '{date:%Y}/{slug}.html'
   ARTICLE_URL = '{date:%Y}/{slug}.html'

"testpost.md" would include:

   Title: Test Post
   Category: test
   Date: 2014-10-31

   ![Icon]({attach}icons/icon.png)
   ![Photo]({attach}photo.jpg)
   [Downloadable File]({attach}/downloads/archive.zip)

Site generation would then produce an output directory structured like
this:

   output
   └── 2014
       ├── archive.zip
       ├── icons
       │   └── icon.png
       ├── photo.jpg
       └── test-post.html

Notice that all the files linked using "{attach}" ended up in or
beneath the article's output directory.

If a static file is linked multiple times, the relocating feature of
"{attach}" will only work in the first of those links to be processed.
After the first link, Pelican will treat "{attach}" like "{static}".
This avoids breaking the already-processed links.

**Be careful when linking to a file from multiple documents:** Since
the first link to a file finalizes its location and Pelican does not
define the order in which documents are processed, using "{attach}" on
a file linked by multiple documents can cause its location to change
from one site build to the next. (Whether this happens in practice
will depend on the operating system, file system, version of Pelican,
and documents being added, modified, or removed from the project.) Any
external sites linking to the file's old location might then find
their links broken. **It is therefore advisable to use {attach} only
if you use it in all links to a file, and only if the linking
documents share a single directory.** Under these conditions, the
file's output location will not change in future builds. In cases
where these precautions are not possible, consider using "{static}"
links instead of "{attach}", and letting the file's location be
determined by the project's "STATIC_SAVE_AS" and "STATIC_URL"
settings. (Per-file "save_as" and "url" overrides can still be set in
"EXTRA_PATH_METADATA".)

Note:

  When using "{attach}", any parent directory in "*_URL" / "*_SAVE_AS"
  settings should match each other. See also: URL settings


Linking to authors, categories, index and tags
----------------------------------------------

You can link to authors, categories, index and tags using the
"{author}name", "{category}foobar", "{index}" and "{tag}tagname"
syntax.


Deprecated internal link syntax
-------------------------------

To remain compatible with earlier versions, Pelican still supports
vertical bars ("||") in addition to curly braces ("{}") for internal
links. For example: "|filename|an_article.rst", "|tag|tagname",
"|category|foobar". The syntax was changed from "||" to "{}" to avoid
collision with Markdown extensions or reST directives. Similarly,
Pelican also still supports linking to static content with
"{filename}". The syntax was changed to "{static}" to allow linking to
both generated articles and pages and their static sources.

Support for the old syntax may eventually be removed.


Including other files
---------------------

Both Markdown and reStructuredText syntaxes provide mechanisms for
this.

Following below are some examples for **reStructuredText** using the
include directive:

      .. include:: file.rst

Include a fragment of a file delimited by two identifiers, highlighted
as C++ (slicing based on line numbers is also possible):

      .. include:: main.cpp
          :code: c++
          :start-after: // begin
          :end-before: // end

Include a raw HTML file (or an inline SVG) and put it directly into
the output without any processing:

      .. raw:: html
          :file: table.html

For **Markdown**, one must rely on an extension. For example, using
the mdx_include plugin:

      ```html
      {! template.html !}
      ```


Importing an existing site
==========================

It is possible to import your site from several other blogging sites
(like WordPress, Tumblr, ..) using a simple script. See Importing an
existing site.


Translations
============

It is possible to translate articles. To do so, you need to add a
"lang" meta attribute to your articles/pages and set a "DEFAULT_LANG"
setting (which is English [en] by default). With those settings in
place, only articles with the default language will be listed, and
each article will be accompanied by a list of available translations
for that article.

Note:

  This core Pelican functionality does not create sub-sites (e.g.
  "example.com/de") with translated templates for each language. For
  such advanced functionality the i18n_subsites plugin can be used.

By default, Pelican uses the article's URL "slug" to determine if two
or more articles are translations of one another. (This can be changed
with the "ARTICLE_TRANSLATION_ID" setting.) The slug can be set
manually in the file's metadata; if not set explicitly, Pelican will
auto-generate the slug from the title of the article.

Here is an example of two articles, one in English and the other in
French.

The English article:

   Foobar is not dead
   ##################

   :slug: foobar-is-not-dead
   :lang: en

   That's true, foobar is still alive!

And the French version:

   Foobar n'est pas mort !
   #######################

   :slug: foobar-is-not-dead
   :lang: fr

   Oui oui, foobar est toujours vivant !

Post content quality notwithstanding, you can see that only item in
common between the two articles is the slug, which is functioning here
as an identifier. If you'd rather not explicitly define the slug this
way, you must then instead ensure that the translated article titles
are identical, since the slug will be auto-generated from the article
title.

If you do not want the original version of one specific article to be
detected by the "DEFAULT_LANG" setting, use the "translation" metadata
to specify which posts are translations:

   Foobar is not dead
   ##################

   :slug: foobar-is-not-dead
   :lang: en
   :translation: true

   That's true, foobar is still alive!


Syntax highlighting
===================

Pelican can provide colorized syntax highlighting for your code
blocks. To do so, you must use the following conventions inside your
content files.

For reStructuredText, use the "code-block" directive to specify the
type of code to be highlighted (in these examples, we'll use
"python"):

   .. code-block:: python

      print("Pelican is a static site generator.")

For Markdown, which utilizes the CodeHilite extension to provide
syntax highlighting, include the language identifier just above the
code block, indenting both the identifier and the code:

   There are two ways to specify the identifier:

       :::python
       print("The triple-colon syntax will *not* show line numbers.")

   To display line numbers, use a path-less shebang instead of colons:

       #!python
       print("The path-less shebang syntax *will* show line numbers.")

The specified identifier (e.g. "python", "ruby") should be one that
appears on the list of available lexers.

When using reStructuredText the following options are available in the
*code-block* directive:

+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| Option        | Valid values | Description                                    |
|===============|==============|================================================|
| anchorlinenos | N/A          | If present, wrap line numbers in "<a>" tags.   |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| classprefix   | string       | String to prepend to token class names         |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| hl_lines      | numbers      | List of lines to be highlighted, where line    |
|               |              | numbers to highlight are separated by a space. |
|               |              | This is similar to "emphasize-lines" in        |
|               |              | Sphinx, but it does not support a range of     |
|               |              | line numbers separated by a hyphen, or comma-  |
|               |              | separated line numbers.                        |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| lineanchors   | string       | Wrap each line in an anchor using this string  |
|               |              | and -linenumber.                               |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| linenos       | string       | If present or set to "table", output line      |
|               |              | numbers in a table; if set to "inline", output |
|               |              | them inline. "none" means do not output the    |
|               |              | line numbers for this table.                   |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| linenospecial | number       | If set, every nth line will be given the       |
|               |              | 'special' CSS class.                           |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| linenostart   | number       | Line number for the first line.                |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| linenostep    | number       | Print every nth line number.                   |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| lineseparator | string       | String to print between lines of code, 'n' by  |
|               |              | default.                                       |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| linespans     | string       | Wrap each line in a span using this and        |
|               |              | -linenumber.                                   |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| nobackground  | N/A          | If set, do not output background color for the |
|               |              | wrapping element                               |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| nowrap        | N/A          | If set, do not wrap the tokens at all.         |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| tagsfile      | string       | ctags file to use for name definitions.        |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+
| tagurlformat  | string       | format for the ctag links.                     |
+---------------+--------------+------------------------------------------------+

Note that, depending on the version, your Pygments module might not
have all of these options available. Refer to the *HtmlFormatter*
section of the Pygments documentation for more details on each of the
options.

For example, the following code block enables line numbers, starting
at 153, and prefixes the Pygments CSS classes with *pgcss* to make the
names more unique and avoid possible CSS conflicts:

   .. code-block:: identifier
       :classprefix: pgcss
       :linenos: table
       :linenostart: 153

      <indented code block goes here>

It is also possible to specify the "PYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS" variable in
your Pelican settings file to include options that will be
automatically applied to every code block.

For example, if you want to have line numbers displayed for every code
block and a CSS prefix, you would set this variable to:

   PYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS = {'classprefix': 'pgcss', 'linenos': 'table'}

If specified, settings for individual code blocks will override the
defaults in your settings file.


Publishing drafts
=================

If you want to publish an article or a page as a draft (for friends to
review before publishing, for example), you can add a "Status: draft"
attribute to its metadata. That article will then be output to the
"drafts" folder and not listed on the index page nor on any category
or tag page.

If your articles should be automatically published as a draft (to not
accidentally publish an article before it is finished), include the
status in the "DEFAULT_METADATA":

   DEFAULT_METADATA = {
       'status': 'draft',
   }

To publish a post when the default status is "draft", update the
post's metadata to include "Status: published".


Hidden Posts
============

Like pages, posts can also be marked as "hidden" with the "Status:
hidden" attribute. Hidden posts will be output to "ARTICLE_SAVE_AS" as
expected, but are not included by default in tag, category, and author
indexes, nor in the main article feed. This has the effect of creating
an "unlisted" post.


Skip Posts
==========

Posts marked with "skip" status are ignored entirely. They are not
processed nor output to the "ARTICLE_SAVE_AS" path. Such posts will
similarly not be included in indexes or feeds.
