Generating Jekyll Pages from Liquid and Markdown instead of HTML

2
votes

I'm using a slightly modified version of the example generator from Jekyll's plugins section of their docs (https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Plugins#generators) and I'm curious if there is any way to parse a liquid/markdown file instead of a plain HTML files from the example?

Notice this line:

self.read_yaml(File.join(base, '_layouts'), 'category_index.html')

That category index.html file is the target file which will be used in generated files. My goal is to be able to pass an object to a my generator from my _config file which I can then use to build a bunch of pages from a .markdown file instead. Does anyone know if this is possible or have any recommendations for achieving this? I looked into the Kramdown lib that's used to parse markdown internally, and I'm not opposed to invoking it myself if I have to, just wasn't sure if I was going deeper than I needed to for something that should be so simple. The API for the Page object which my generator creates is here: http://ruby-doc.org/gems/docs/j/jekyll-0.12.0/Jekyll/Page.html

Thanks a ton, - Keith

1
rubymarkdownjekyllliquid

1 Answers

0
votes

You can generate virtually any format you want, from virtually any data source you want, in a generator, because you're writing straight Ruby with full access to the Jekyll object model. For example, here's a generator I put together the other night that fetches GitHub commits during jekyll build.

The question I would be asking is this:

  1. Do I need a plugin to accomplish this?
  2. If so, do I need a formal generator plugin as discussed in the Jekyll docs?
  3. Or should I subclass, monkey-patch, or otherwise change the behavior of the built-in generator?

Also, the differences between Markdown and HTML files in this context (where you control 100% of what gets generated) are mostly nominal. read_yaml IIRC will actually read the front matter from both, so that shouldn't be an issue.