Tips n Tricks

Copying favicon/robots.txt

First solution

If you used the pelican-quickstart command to create a Makefile and want certain files copied to your web root — such as favicon.ico, robots.txt, or other files — create a folder called extra next to your Makefile and edit your Makefile to look like this:

 $(OUTPUTDIR)/%.html:
	$(PELICAN) $(INPUTDIR) -o $(OUTPUTDIR) -s $(CONFFILE) $(PELICANOPTS)
	if test -d $(BASEDIR)/extra; then cp $(BASEDIR)/extra/* $(OUTPUTDIR)/; fi

publish:
	$(PELICAN) $(INPUTDIR) -o $(OUTPUTDIR) -s $(PUBLISHCONF) $(PELICANOPTS)
	if test -d $(BASEDIR)/extra; then cp $(BASEDIR)/extra/* $(OUTPUTDIR)/; fi

Second solution, using FILES_TO_COPY

Assuming that you have favicon.ico and robots.txt in the content/extra/ folder, just add the next lines to pelican.conf:

FILES_TO_COPY = (('extra/robots.txt', 'robots.txt'),
                 ('extra/favicon.ico', 'favicon.ico'),)

Make vs Rake vs Fabric

Make is available on almost any Unix-derived system but is old and can be clunky for building anything other than code. Many people prefer to use Rake (ruby make) or Fabric (a Pythonic tool for remote execution and deployment). Please post your examples and tips below for awesome development, testing, and deployment.

make newpost

You can edit your Makefile to give you a handful of new commands that might make it slightly easier to get writing. Just add the following lines to your Makefile:

PAGESDIR=$(INPUTDIR)/pages
DATE := $(shell date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
SLUG := $(shell echo '${NAME}' | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z)
EXT ?= md

newpost:
ifdef NAME
	echo "Title: $(NAME)" >  $(INPUTDIR)/$(SLUG).$(EXT)
	echo "Slug: $(SLUG)" >> $(INPUTDIR)/$(SLUG).$(EXT)
	echo "Date: $(DATE)" >> $(INPUTDIR)/$(SLUG).$(EXT)
	echo ""              >> $(INPUTDIR)/$(SLUG).$(EXT)
	echo ""              >> $(INPUTDIR)/$(SLUG).$(EXT)
	${EDITOR} ${INPUTDIR}/${SLUG}.${EXT} &
else
	@echo 'Variable NAME is not defined.'
	@echo 'Do make newpost NAME='"'"'Post Name'"'"
endif

editpost:
ifdef NAME
	${EDITOR} ${INPUTDIR}/${SLUG}.${EXT} &
else
	@echo 'Variable NAME is not defined.'
	@echo 'Do make editpost NAME='"'"'Post Name'"'"
endif

newpage:
ifdef NAME
	echo "Title: $(NAME)" >  $(PAGESDIR)/$(SLUG).$(EXT)
	echo "Slug: $(SLUG)" >> $(PAGESDIR)/$(SLUG).$(EXT)
	echo ""              >> $(PAGESDIR)/$(SLUG).$(EXT)
	echo ""              >> $(PAGESDIR)/$(SLUG).$(EXT)
	${EDITOR} ${PAGESDIR}/${SLUG}.$(EXT)
else
	@echo 'Variable NAME is not defined.'
	@echo 'Do make newpage NAME='"'"'Page Name'"'"
endif

editpage:
ifdef NAME
	${EDITOR} ${PAGESDIR}/${SLUG}.$(EXT)
else
	@echo 'Variable NAME is not defined.'
	@echo 'Do make editpage NAME='"'"'Page Name'"'"
endif

To use this, make sure you've set the EDITOR environment variable to the name of your favourite editor, (or set it again within the Makefile), and then do

$ make newpost NAME='Your Exciting Post Name Here'

Your editor will appear with the beginnings of a new post. You can set 'EXT' to whatever extension you use most often, and then overwrite it by passing "EXT='newext'" to make. Equally, this change assumes that all your pages are stored in content/pages, which may not be true for you. This sample should work well enough for you to base any modifications off, though.

Generate sitemap.xml

This idea has come to me from Django framework. For generating sitemap.xml we will use a Jinja2 template. First, you should add sitemap.html to templates folder of your theme with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

{% for article in articles %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ SITEURL }}/{{ article.url }}</loc>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>

  {% for translation in article.translations %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ SITEURL }}/{{ translation.url }}</loc>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

{% for page in pages %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ SITEURL }}/{{ page.url }}</loc>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>

  {% for translation in page.translations %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ SITEURL }}/{{ translation.url }}</loc>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

</urlset>

Next, you should add this template to the list with direct templates. So make sure that DIRECT_TEMPLATES tuple in your settings.py contains sitemap.

# default value is ('index', 'tags', 'categories', 'archives')
# so we just add a 'sitemap'
DIRECT_TEMPLATES = ('index', 'tags', 'categories', 'archives', 'sitemap')

Finally, you should set SITEMAP_SAVE_AS variable for saving result as 'sitemap.xml'.

SITEMAP_SAVE_AS = 'sitemap.xml'

pelican-mode for Emacs

https://github.com/joewreschnig/pelican-mode

pelican-mode has commands for generating post files, as well as rebuild and uploading sites from emacs.