nell

An opinionated nodejs clone of Octopress. Not for production use as of yet, still in very active development.

Getting Started

Install the module with: npm install -g nell

Commands

• nell init <name> - Generate a new static site folder

• nell generate - Generate a static version of your site to the ./output folder

• nell preview - Preview the static site with express

• nell new_post <name> - Create a new markdown post

• nell new_page <name> - Create a new markdown page

• nell plugins - See a list of all plugins available in your theme and markdown files

For a full list of commands type nell --help

Creating a site

To create a site, first type nell init mysite then switch in to the directory.

This will generate a folder containing:

mysite -
        | - source -
                   | - pages
                   | - posts
        | - template -
                     | - default

From there, type nell generate and the HTML will be generated to the output directory. To preview, type nell preview.

Edit the templates in the template folder with your layout.

nell.json file

When you generate a site, a nell.json file will be generated in the root, it looks like this:

{
  "site": {
    "url": {
      "href": "http://example.com",
      "root": "/",
      "permalink": "/blog/:year/:month/:day/:title"
    },
    "title": "nell Site",
    "subtitle": "A site generated with nell",
    "author": "",
    "search": "http://google.com/search",
    "description": "",

    "theme": {
      "name": "default",
      "index": "default.jade"
    },

    "date_format": "dddd, dS mmmm yyyy @ h:MMTT",
    "paginate": {
      "number_per_page" : 5
    },

    "google_analytics_tracking_id": ""
  },

  "menu": [{
    "title": "Home",
    "path": "/"
  }, {
    "title": "About",
    "path": "/about/"
  }]
}

Edit this file to change your site settings such as title, url, theme and menu.

Plugins

Plugins are modules that are included in your site plugins folder, as well as currently two included in the nell directory - dateformat and gist.

Plugins can be used in posts with the {% %} tags - each plugin takes a set of required and optional arguments. For example, the gist plugin can be used like so in markdown

... Some markdown content ...
{% gist 4202899 interval.js %}
... Some more markdown content ...

They are also available in template files on the plugin object, for example in a jade template:

h3 Posted on #{plugins.dateformat(post.date, site.date_format)}

Plugins are still an early development and the format may change to support more powerful features, but for now they are simple synchronous functions that must return a value that can be output as a string (String, Number)

Contributing

Submit issues and suggestions to https://github.com/tanepiper/nell

Release History

• 2nd December 2012
  • Initial release

License

Copyright (c) 2012 Tane Piper
Licensed under the MIT license.