ContentMachine

ContentMachine is a static content engine written in Javascript, for Node.js projects. It powers my personal site and is meant to be used for sites with static content, such as blogs or websites, either as a complimentary addition or the sole thing driving it - that's for you to decide.

Note: for any issues please refer to the ticket tracker.

Example content file

All of the content files in ContentMachine are Markdown files. That means they have a file name of example.md. They can be in any directory you want (you can specify it) and they contain YAML metadata. An example of a ContentMachine file is the following (probably a familiar format if you've used Jekyll before):

---
date: 2019-02-18
status: public
slug: example-url-slug
title: Example page
---

Example content in **Markdown** goes here.

This would create the following object:

{
  meta: {
    date: "2019-02-18",
    status: "public",
    slug: "example-url-slug",
    title: "Example page"
  },
  content: "<p>Example content in <em>Markdown</em> goes here.</p>"
}

Installation

To install ContentMachine, get it from NPM:

npm install contentmachine --save

And then simply require it:

const contentmachine = require('contentmachine')

Usage

Retrieving all content in a directory

To retrieve all of the content in a directory, simply initialize ContentMachine with your provided directory and call items() on it, like this:

const content = new contentmachine({directory: "./Blog/"})

content.items().then(items => {

  // access your items here

})

This will return you an array of objects.

Retreving a specific item in a directory

To retrieve a specific content item in a directory, initialize ContentMachine and call item({key: "key", value: "value"}) on it (where key is corresponding with the YAML meta key and the value with its value in the file), like this:

const content = new contentmachine({directory: "./Blog/"})

content.item({key: "slug", value: "hello-world"}).then(item => {

  // access your item here

})

Ordering content

You can order content by any meta key in descending or ascending order. For example; if we want to order content by the meta key date in a descending order, we would do the following:

const content = new contentmachine({directory: "./Blog/", orderBy: "date", order: "desc"})

Likewise if you want it to be in ascending order, simply change order to asc.

Limiting and offsetting content

You can limit and offset content by adding limit and/or offset to the constructor. For example:

const content = new contentmachine({directory: "./Blog", limit: 100, offset: 50})

Note that if you don't specify limit or offset, then they fall back to their default values 10 and 0, respectively.

Turning off Markdown parsing

There might be a use case where you don't want the body of the document to be parsed into HTML from Markdown and you wish to get plaintext instead. In that case, simply pass parseMarkdown: false to the constructor of ContentMachine, like so:

const content = new contentmachine({directory: "./Blog", parseMarkdown: false});