Bridgetown Feed plugin

A Bridgetown plugin to generate an Atom (RSS-like) feed of your Bridgetown posts and other collection documents.

Installation for Bridgetown 1.2+

Run this command to add this plugin to your site's Gemfile:

$ bundle add bridgetown-feed

Or simply add this line to your Gemfile:

gem 'bridgetown-feed'

And then add the initializer to your configuration in config/initializers.rb:

Bridgetown.configure do
  # existing config here

  init :"bridgetown-feed"
end

(For Bridgetown 1.1 or earlier, read these instructions.)

Usage

The plugin exposes a helper tag to expose the appropriate meta tags to support automated discovery of your feed.

Simply place feed_meta someplace in your layout's <head> section to output the necessary metadata.

<!-- layout.liquid -->
{% feed_meta %}

<!-- layout.erb -->
<%= feed_meta %>

The plugin will automatically generate an Atom feed at /feed.xml.

Optional configuration options

The plugin will automatically use any of the following metadata variables if they are present in your site's _data/site_metadata.yml file.

  • title or name - The title of the site, e.g., "My awesome site"
  • description - A longer description of what your site is about, e.g., "Where I blog about Bridgetown and other awesome things"
  • author - Global author information (see below)

In addition it looks for these bridgetown.config.yml settings:

  • url - The URL to your site, e.g., https://example.com.

Already have a feed path?

Do you already have an existing feed someplace other than /feed.xml, but are on a host like GitHub Pages that doesn't support machine-friendly redirects? If you simply swap out bridgetown-feed for your existing template, your existing subscribers won't continue to get updates. Instead, you can specify a non-default path via your site's config.

feed:
  path: atom.xml

To note, you shouldn't have to do this unless you already have a feed you're using, and you can't or wish not to redirect existing subscribers.

Optional front matter

The plugin will use the following post metadata, automatically generated by Bridgetown, which you can override via a post's YAML front matter:

  • date
  • title
  • excerpt
  • id
  • category
  • tags

Additionally, the plugin will use the following values, if present in a post's YAML front matter:

  • image - URL of an image that is representative of the post (can also be passed as image.path)

  • author - The author of the post, e.g., "Dr. Bridgetown". If none is given, feed readers will look to the feed author as defined in _data/site_metadata.yml. Like the feed author, this can also be an object or a reference to an author in _data/authors.yml (see below).

Author information

TL;DR: In most cases, put author: [your name] in the document's front matter, for sites with multiple authors. If you need something more complicated, read on.

There are several ways to convey author-specific information. Author information is found in the following order of priority:

  1. An author object, in the documents's front matter, e.g.:
  author:
    name: Issac Asimov
  1. An author object, in the site's _data/site_metadata.yml, e.g.:
  author:
    name: Issac Asimov
  1. site.data.authors[author], if an author is specified in the document's front matter, and a corresponding key exists in site.data.authors. E.g., you have the following in the document's front matter:
  author: iasimov

And you have the following in _data/authors.yml:

  iasimov:
    picture: /images/marina.jpg
    name: Issac Asimov

  jwhite:
    picture: /images/jared.jpg
    name: Jared White

In the above example, the author iasimov's name will be resolved to Issac Asimov. This allows you to centralize author information in a single _data/authors.yml file for site with many authors that require more than just the author's username.

Pro-tip: If authors is present in the document's front matter as an array (and author is not), the plugin will use the first author listed.

  1. An author in the document's front matter (the simplest way), e.g.:
  author: marina
  1. An author in the site's _data/site_metadata.yml, e.g.:
  author: marina

The author keys the plugin can read are name, email, and uri (for linking to an author's website).

SmartyPants

The plugin uses Bridgetown's smartify filter for processing the site title and post titles. This will translate plain ASCII punctuation into "smart" typographic punctuation. This will not render or strip any Markdown you may be using in a title.

Bridgetown's smartify filter uses kramdown as a processor. Accordingly, if you do not want "smart" typographic punctuation, disabling them in kramdown in your bridgetown.config.yml will disable them in your feed. For example:

   kramdown:
     smart_quotes:               apos,apos,quot,quot
     typographic_symbols:        {hellip: ...}

Custom styling

Want to style what your feed looks like in the browser? Simply add an XSLT at /feed.xslt.xml and Bridgetown Feed will link to the stylesheet.

Categories

Bridgetown Feed can generate feeds for each category. Simply define which categories you'd like feeds for in your config:

feed:
  categories:
    - news
    - updates

Collections

Bridgetown Feed can generate feeds for collections other than the Posts collection. This works best for chronological collections (e.g., collections with dates in the filenames). Simply define which collections you'd like feeds for in your config:

feed:
  collections:
    - changes

By default, collection feeds will be outputted to /feed/<COLLECTION>.xml. If you'd like to customize the output path, specify a collection's custom path as follows:

feed:
  collections:
    changes:
      path: "/changes.xml"

Finally, collections can also have category feeds which are outputted as /feed/<COLLECTION>/<CATEGORY>.xml. Specify categories like so:

feed:
  collections:
    changes:
      path: "/changes.xml"
      categories:
        - news
        - updates

Excerpt Only flag

Optional flag excerpt_only allows you to exclude post content from the Atom feed. Default value is false for backward compatibility.

When it's set to true in bridgetown.config.yml, all posts in feed will be without <content> tags.

feed:
  excerpt_only: true

The same flag can be used directly in post file. It will be disable <content> tag for selected post. Settings in post file has higher priority than in config file.

Post Limit

Optional flag post_limit allows you to set a limit to the number of posts shown in the feed. Default value is 10.

When it is set in bridgetown.config.yml, all collections will be limited:

feed:
  post_limit: 25

The same flag can also be set on a collection:

feed:
  collections:
    changes:
      post_limit: 25

Testing

  • Run bundle exec rspec to run the test suite
  • Or run script/cibuild to validate with Rubocop and test with rspec together

Contributing

  1. Fork it (https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown-feed/fork)
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create a new Pull Request