Working with content

Ignite parses Markdown files in in your Content folder, automatically converting them to pages.

You should create subfolders inside Content to represent different types of content. This might be by date, e.g. Content/2023, Content/2024, etc, by type, e.g. Content/articles, Content/tutorials, or whatever other approach you want.

When it come to rendering your articles, you have two options:

  1. You can use YAML front matter to specify the layout to use for your content.
  2. You can provide only one layout in your site, and it will be used if nothing else is specified.

This example site contains two types of content, articles and stories. Some content requests a specific layout, but others don’t.

This content uses the default layout.

And this content uses a custom layout.

Listing content

All pages of all types are given access to the current publishing context, which lets you read content data by type or tag, and more.

As a result, we can write code to show a list of all articles right here on this page:

List {
    for content in context.allContent {
        Link(content)
    }
}

Or we could show only content that matches the type story:

List {
    for content in context.content(ofType: "story") {
        Link(content)
    }
}

But there are a handful of helpers available to make things both easier and more attractive.

First, ContentPreview can be used to make a preview for articles. This automatically includes the articles image, title, description, link, and tags, all in one:

Section {
    for item in context.allContent {
        ContentPreview(for: item)
            .width(3)
            .margin(.bottom)
    }
}

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YAML front matter

Ignite supports Jekyll-style YAML front matter to specify metadata.

Specifically, the following fields are supported:

As well as the predefined fields, you can use the metadata dictionary to access any custom properties you have defined in the front matter. Note that the dictionary values are optionals: your page code must be able to deal with the dictionary item not existing!

Text(content.metadata["CustomValue"] ?? "Not defined")

In addition, you can read properties such as estimatedWordCount and estimatedReadingMinutes on your content, to provide extra information to users.

Tag pages

If you make a type that conforms to the TagPage protocol, you can use it to display tag pages on your site.

This protocol passes you an optional tag string: if it has a tag you should use it, but if it’s nil you should render an “all tags” page.

This sample site has a small tags page implementation. You can see it in action with these links:

Created with Ignite