OrchidPosts

Add Jekyll-like blogging functionality to your Orchid site.


About

Add Jekyll-like blogging functionality to your Orchid site, with dated blog posts and RSS/Atom feeds.

This plugin only creates the blog posts themselves. To generate archives for your blog posts' tags and categories, check out the OrchidTaxonomies plugin, and refer to the OrchidStarter repo for basic taxonomies setup.

Installation

dependencies {
    orchidRuntime("io.github.javaeden.orchid:OrchidPosts:0.21.2")
}
<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.javaeden.orchid</groupId>
    <artifactId>OrchidPosts</artifactId>
    <version>0.21.2</version>
    <type>pom</type>
</dependency>
libraryDependencies += "io.github.javaeden.orchid" % "OrchidPosts" % "0.21.2"
@file:DependsOn("io.github.javaeden.orchid:OrchidPosts:0.21.2")

Demo

Usage

Basic Usage

Orchid supports blogging in a manner similar to Jekyll, but made to be much easier to manage for large blogs. Blog posts all have an intrinsic publish date, and can be grouped into hierarchical categories. Blog posts are found as files in posts/ where the filename matches the pattern of YYYY-MM-DD-post-slug. The file type can be anything that Orchid can process, and the date in the filename is automatically set as the post's publishDate and will not be rendered in the output site until after that date.

. / (resources root)
├── homepage.md
├── config.yml
└── posts/
    └── 2019-01-01-blog-post-one.md <-- compiled as Markdown to /2019/1/1/blog-post-one

You may also group your posts by year, month, and day in folders, instead of requiring them all to be in the filename. For example, instead of having a post from a file at posts/2018-01-01-post-one.md, you could instead group your posts by year (posts/2018/01-01-post-one.md), by year and month (posts/2018/01/01-post-one.md), or by year, month, and day (posts/2018/01/01/post-one.md). This is completely optional, and you can mix-and-match individual posts into these formats as needed for better organization.

. / (resources root)
├── homepage.md
├── config.yml
└── posts/
    ├── 2018/ <-- group posts by year
    |   └── 01 <-- group posts by month 
    |       └── 02-blog-post-two.md <-- filename includes day, lives at /2018/1/2/blog-post-two
    └── 2017/ <-- group posts by year
        └── 02-03-blog-post-three.md <-- filename includes month and day, lives at /2017/2/3/blog-post-three

You can further write posts as index files in a subdirectory, such as YYYY/MM/DD/post-slug/index.md.

Instead of using the full YYYY-MM-DD date format as the post date, you can also use a year and the day of year, which may be easier for generating posts from scripts. Such a format would look like YYYY-DayOfYear-post-slug.md instead. For example, posts/2018/001/post-one/index.md resolves to a date of January 1st, 2018, and posts/2018/081/post-one/index.md is March 22, 2018.

Post Title

By default, the title of the blog post is given as the post-slug part of the filename, converted to a human-readable, capitalized title, unless a title is set in the post's Front Matter.

// posts/2018-01-01-post-one.md <-- Post title is "Post One"
---
---
// posts/2018-01-01-post-one.md
---
title: First Blog Post <-- Post title is "First Blog Post", not "Post One"
---

Posts can customize their permalink by setting the permalink property in their Front Matter. The permalink takes a string with certain path segments set up as dynamic parts, such as blog/:year/:month/:slug. Any path segment which matches the pattern of :key or {key} will attempt to fill that segment with some dynamic data, such as the post's published year, month, or date, its category, or any variable set in its Front Matter.

// posts/2018-01-01-post-one.md
---
title: First Blog Post
permalink: 'blog/:year/:slug' <-- permalink at /blog/2018/post-one
---

Using Categories

Categories must be set in your config.yml, and posts will only be added if they are in the path within posts/ corresponding to one of these configured categories. Categories may be nested inside a parent category, but it must build a complete hierarchy, where every parent category is also listed as its own category.

posts:
  baseDir: 'blog'  # (1) 
  categories:
    - 'personal'  # (2)
    - 'programming'  # (3)
    - 'programming/android'  # (4)
    - 'programming/web'  # (5)
  1. Looks for the blog posts in blog/ instead of posts/
  2. Creates a category in {baseDir}/personal, and every post in that folder will be in the personal category
  3. Creates a category in {baseDir}/programming, and every post in that folder will be in the programming category
  4. Creates a category in {baseDir}/programming/android, and every post in that folder will be in the android primary category, but will also be in the programming category since it is a parent category of android.
  5. Creates a category in {baseDir}/programming/web, and every post in that folder will be in the web primary category, but will also be in the programming category since it is a parent category of web.

Note: if no categories are given, all posts in the {baseDir} are simply considered blog posts without any category, and is just a generic "blog". If you do specify categories, then all posts must be in one of the defined categories, otherwise they will be ignored; there is no concept of 'uncategorized' posts unless you choose to create a category called 'uncategorized' and put uncategorized posts there.

Customizing Categories

Using the configuration block shown above will set up your categories with all default values, but it is likely that you will want to change certain features of the posts in a category based on which category they are in. Currently, Categories can customize their own title to be different from their path, and they can set the permalink structure to be the same for all posts in that category.

There are several different ways to set up the category configuration. (1) You can set the category as a String to use default values, as shown above; (2) you can set each list item to be a map of config values, where the key property is the category path; (3) or you can set each list item to be a map with a single property that is the category path, and whose value is a map of configuration values.

# Method (1), String as category path
posts: 
  categories:
    - 'personal'
    - 'programming'
# Method (2), Map with config values and `key` property as category path
posts: 
  categories:
    - key: 'personal'
      title: 'Personal Blog'
    - key: 'programming'
      title: 'programming Blog'
# Method (3), Map with only key as category path, and value as config values
posts: 
  categories:
    - personal: 
        title: 'Personal Blog'
    - programming:
        title: 'programming Blog'

Note that there is no difference between Method (2) and Method (3), it is simply a matter of preference.

Post Authors

Blog posts can have authors assigned to them. Orchid Posts generates Author pages for known authors, but does allow for "guest" authors to be defined for a single post. Both known and guest authors accept the same configuration object, but where that object is defined is different for each.

Known Authors

Known authors can be set just in the config.yml under the posts.authors key. These authors will have default pages generated for them, and can be linked to directly from the blog post. You can also create a content file under the posts/authors/ directory to customize the content of that page, such as to show a bio for the author. In this case, the same configuration values can be set in the page's Front Matter.

From any post's Front Matter, you may set the author property to the name of one of these known authors, and that Author will then be linked to the post.

Guest Authors

Guest authors may be set by setting a post's author property to a map of Author config values, instead of as the name of a known author. This will display the same information for the author as for a known author, but they will not have a landing page generated to link to.

Post Comments

OrchidPosts supports comments via Disqus with the disqus. Using Archetypes, it is quite simple to set up all your blog posts to have a comments section with the disqus component without having to manually add the component to each page.

RSS and Atom Feeds

OrchidPosts will generate feeds for your content automatically, in both the RSS and Atom formats. You can customize the feeds from the feeds generator object in your config.yml, such as how many entries to include in the feed, or which generators to include pages from (defaults to just the posts generator). Pages included in the feed are sorted by their publishDate, and the feed content comes from the feeds/rss.peb and feeds/atom.peb pages, which can be overridden and customized if needed.

Since 0.19.0, after creating feeds, you can use the feedLink meta-component to add <link rel='alternate'> tags to the head of the page, pointing to the generated feeds. See example config below to add alternate links to all post pages:

# config.yml

posts:
  postPages:
    metaComponents:
      - type: 'feedLinks'