Is this ready for use?

[tyeeman]

Hi atmoz
Saw your ycombinator post about this. I did a "go get" and got an exe. I'm on Windows7. Shall I give it a try?

[atmoz]

I'm using this for my own personal website, but have been busy with exams lately, so I haven't been able to write documentation. I have some ideas for improvements as well.

Since there are no documentation at the moment, you could get inspiration from here: https://github.com/atmoz/atmoz-net (templates are in the .ply directory).

Any feedback or ideas is welcome for future development.

[tyeeman]

Ok, I'll give it a try. The only extra thing I need is tags for posts, is that doable?

I looked at your site you suggested above. Is it using the current version of ply? There seems to be a lot of extras there that are not described in this ply repo?

[atmoz]

Yes, I'm using tags on my own website.

I haven't written much documentation (yet), so for now, my website mentioned above is the best source to learn about this tool.

You can see available template functions here (if you do not mind reading some code): https://github.com/atmoz/ply/blob/master/templatefn.go

[tyeeman]

Ok, just ran it and got this error -

panic: regexp: Compile(`^g:\laragonServerPortable\www\ply\ply.build`): error parsing regexp: invalid
 escape sequence: `\l`

goroutine 1 [running]:
regexp.MustCompile(0xc04206c570, 0x2b, 0x1)
        C:/go/src/regexp/regexp.go:240 +0x178
main.(*Site).Init(0x70f100, 0x604edb, 0x8)
        C:/goWorkspace/src/github.com/atmoz/ply/site.go:64 +0x184
main.main()
        C:/goWorkspace/src/github.com/atmoz/ply/main.go:49 +0x1e4

Windows uses backslash not front slash, I think that's it??

[atmoz]

Yeah, the directory path is used as regex, and apparently backslash in the path is parsed as an escape character.

Haven't tried this on Windows yet (I'm using Linux). Good thing you tested it, so I'm now aware of the problem. I will have to test this on Windows and fix any related bugs.

[tyeeman]

Is there a quick change I can make at my end and recompile locally here just to get it to work?

[atmoz]

I'll take a closer look tomorrow, but I guess the solution is to replace \ with \\ on line 64 in site.go.

[tyeeman]

So I would have to do the "go get" command again to get the new version from github. I've never done anything but that. Is there a local command I can use to rebuild my exe after I do the local mod?

[atmoz]

Fixed in e68897f. I tested ply on a windows laptop for the first time and I can see there are some problems with newline that I have to look into as well.

[tyeeman]

Ok, I'm testing. Previous problem gone. Thanks. Now I'm getting something funny with the menuing. In the build folder if I load one of the main pages, not a blog page, it shows fine. All the links in the menu are perfect. If I click on a link to a blog post, I see it fine but then all my menu links have "blog" inserted into them which makes everything not work. Give it a try. I've never seen menu items change, strange. The page source file is unchanged -

<li><a href="blog\overview.html">Overview</a></li>
<li><a href="blog\welcome.html">Welcome</a></li>
<li><a href="quick-start.html">Quick Start</a></li>
<li><a href="serving-a-blog.html">Serving a Blog</a></li>

Note above - backslashes should be frontslashes.

Update- Must be something to do with relative links in the menu. Notice above the links are relative to where you are. So if I'm in a blog page and hover over other menu items, the above links take hold and I get "blog\blog\overview.html" etc. which does not exist. So how to prevent this? Make them absolute from root. I'll try it. Nope - not when ply is in a sub-folder of the root, which mine is.

One other thing - When I go into a blog post I lose the link to images because the image folder is in the main folder not the blog folder. How to fix? Duplicating the image folder into the blog folder is not a good remedy.

Update2 - Ok, I tried making everything absolute from the root and the menu items need to look like this

<li><a href="/blog/overview.html">Overview</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/welcome.html">Welcome</a></li>
<li><a href="/quick-start.html">Quick Start</a></li>
<li><a href="/serving-a-blog.html">Serving a Blog</a></li>

Now all works. I suspect the images folder needs the same thing.
Is there any way to make it work using relative links?

I don't see any newline problems. My markdown seems to populate my template fine.

So only one mod to do, add that front slash in menu items first character and change the backslash to frontslash in the rest of their paths.

One other consideration - Instead of multiple links on the main menu to the blog posts how about one "Blog" menu item that links to a blog page with the blog menu items there.

[atmoz]

Backslashes should indeed be frontslashes. It's using relative paths from the filesystem right now.

Regarding relative paths, when a template is used on a page, all paths are relative to that page. So when you want to link to files on the same level as the template, e.g. index.html, it will work fine for all pages on that same level. But once you add more directories with pages that inherit that template, the links will point to the wrong file (i.e. missing the needed ../ in front.

The second problem you have identified is the use of page .Path will always output paths relative to the root site directory.

Both these relative path problems are solved by using .Rel, have a look at my main ply.template:

<link href="{{ .Rel "style.css" }}" rel="stylesheet" />

Since my style.css will always be in the same path (root of my site), but my template is used on different directories, I have to pass style.css to .Rel, so the path always becomes relative to the current page path being rendered by the template.

This makes the href become ../style.css when visiting a page one directory level down from site root.

I try to avoid using absolute paths, as that limits where you can deploy your website. By always using relative paths, it's easy to host the website independent of directory levels. Imagine if you one day want to move your blog from blog.domain to domain/blog.

Hopes that makes sense!

[tyeeman]

.Rel works for my images -

"{{ .Rel "img/lodge-r.jpg" }}"

but I changed my template to this but still not right for navigation -

<ul>
{{ range .Sitemap -}}
    <li><a href="{{ .Rel .Path }}">{{ .Title }}</a></li>
{{ end -}}
</ul>

[atmoz]

You are calling .Rel .Path in the context of range .Sitemap, meaning that you are asking for the relative page path on itself. Change it to $.Rel .Path, and you will use the outer context (the page the template is rendering for), and you will get the relative path from the rendered page to the menu item (which is what you want).

[tyeeman]

Great, thanks working good.
Any thoughts on making a "Blog" menu item that takes us to the blog page with post listings? Can you think of an easy way to get something like that. Currently if I have 30 blog posts they are going to be located in the menu aren't they? I have room for maybe 5 menu items in my template.

[atmoz]

Sure, that's how I solved it myself. I have a "notes" directory with an empty index.md file and a ply.template (stripped down version here for demonstration):

{ if eq .Path "notes/index.html" }}
    <h1>Notes</h1>
    <ul>
    {{ range .SitemapReversed -}}
        {{ if (pathMatch "notes/*" .Path) | and (not (pathMatch "*/index.html" .Path)) }}
        <li><a href="{{ $.Rel .Path }}">{{ .Title }}</a></li>
        {{ end }}
    {{ end -}}
    </ul>
{{ else }}
{{ .Content }}
{{ end }}

As you can see, I use some template magic to make this work, as I check if the current page being rendered is index.html, in that case a list of all pages from the current directory are outputted (making sure index.html itself is excluded).