Frontmatter replacing custom parser in Render Engine

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 14:00:00 -0000

There's a tug-of-war in software development around whether or not your products should be dependent light or heavy. Render Engine has always taken the stance of in order to make the best possible service with my limited availability for maintenance, I have to rely on folks how are putting energy into components. One area that I did implement myself was a custom parser that allowed you to add all the metadata for your page objects in the file themselves. This was to replicate what static generators like Pelican and and Jekyl were doing to make migrating to Render Engine feel simpler.

Recently, friend and mad-yogi of the internet, Brett Terpstra added support for a framework called Frontmatter to his application bunch. This greatly enhanced the applications ability to customize how and when bunches triggered and increased his ability to add other features to the app.

After that friend and mentor, Jeff Triplett showed me how he was using python-frontmatter along with PyDantic to help build some custom sites to support businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Well, that was enough to encourage me to give it a try.

It's not ready yet. There is a bunch of planning that is still needed to make it stable and to provide an easy conversion path, but in testing I have built initial support for frontmatter in Render Engine.

IT'S NOT TESTED, IT WILL REWRITE YOUR CONTENT TO FIT THAT FORMAT. There will be updates in the future so keep an eye out.