pelican-ab 0.2.2

How to test and publish experiments

For local development use the command:

AB_EXPERIMENT="xy" make regenerate

or

AB_EXPERIMENT=”xy” make html

together with make serve to review the experiments. When you are ready to publish them online use:

rm -rf output/
make github
AB_EXPERIMENT="01" make github
AB_EXPERIMENT="02" make github

See the section about DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY for more info.

Output files

After encoding your experiments into the theme templates you can generate the resulting HTML files like this:

AB_EXPERIMENT="v1" make html

When rendering experiments the resulting HTML files are saved under OUTPUT_PATH plus the experiment name. For example ‘output/v1’, ‘output/v2’, etc. The control experiments are rendered directly under OUTPUT_PATH.

This plugin automatically updates the Content.url and URLWrapper.url class properties from Pelican so that things like {{ article.url }} and {{ author.url }} will point to URLs from the same experiment. In other words each experiment produces its own HTML and URL structure, using the experiment name as prefix. For example ‘blog/about-me.html’ becomes ‘v1/blog/about-me.html’.

DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY

By default publishconf.py etc has DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY set to True which causes pelican-ab to raise an exception. The problem is that you need to execute make publish or make github for each experiment you’d like to publish online. When DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY is True the previous contents will be deleted and ONLY that variation will be published! This will break your website because everything will be gone!

Contributing

Source code and issue tracker are at https://github.com/MrSenko/pelican-ab

Commercial support

Mr. Senko provides commercial support for open source libraries, should you need it!