MarkdownDatafier

MarkdownDatafier is a ruby gem which reads a structure of Markdown files, parses their metadata and outputs to a simple hash. It is framework agnostic, configurable to any content and configuration location and easy to plug into your own API endpoints or controller actions.

MarkdownDatafier was inspired by the NestaCMS framework. But instead of a self-contained CMS, I simply wanted to get data out of a Markdown file structure to be used however I like (direct into Mustache templates via server-side Sinarta or Rails; or via an API endpoint to a javascript framework, iOS/Android app, and so on).

This is currently in an early alpha stage. Though it is likely to remain simple, there will undoubtedly be some feature additions and improvement to things like exception handling. This gem was developed using Ruby 2.0.0p247.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'markdown_datafier'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install markdown_datafier

Usage

Create an object for your server and include MarkdownDatafier:

require 'markdown_datafier'
class MyServerObject
  include MarkdownDatafier
end

Then create an instance of the server using the full path to your config directory:

server = MyServerObject.new(config_directory: "/absolute/path/to/config/")

Inside your configuration directory, configure your config.yml file like so:

content_directory: '/absolute/path/to/content/directory/'

Files are accessed individually by their "shortname" (the file name path inside your content_directory minus the extension, OR the parent directory name)

content = server.find_by_path(some-existing-file)

Nil is returned for non-matching requests.

You can also get the home page like so:

content = server.home_page

Or a splash page like so:

content = server.splash_page

You can also grab a collection of indexes for the top level sections of your content 

collection = server.indexes_for_sections

Or specify a sub level (for instance by using the "shortname" of previously retrieved section):

collection = server.indexes_for_sections("/section-two")

Take a look at the file structure in spec/fixtures/content to see how the directory structure and meta data works.

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  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 new Pull Request