Jinja2Content Plugin for Pelican

This plugin allows the use of Jinja2 directives inside your Pelican articles and pages.

In this approach, your content is first rendered by the Jinja template engine. The result is then passed to the normal Pelican reader as usual. There are two consequences for usage. First, this means the Pelican context and Jinja variables usually visible to your article or page template are not available at rendering time. Second, it means that if any of your input content could be parsed as Jinja directives, they will be rendered as such. This is unlikely to happen accidentally, but it’s good to be aware of.

All input that needs Pelican variables such as article, category, etc., should be put inside your theme’s templating. As such, the main use of this plugin is to automatically generate parts of your articles or pages.

Markdown, reStructured Text, and HTML input are all supported. Note that by enabling this plugin, all input files of these file types will be pre-processed with the Jinja renderer. It is not currently supported to selectively enable or disable jinja2content for only some of these input sources.

Example

One usage is to embed repetitive HTML in Markdown articles. Since Markdown doesn’t allow customization of layout, if anything more sophisticated than just displaying an image is necessary, one is forced to embed HTML in Markdown articles (i.e. hard-code <div> tags and then select them from the theme’s CSS). However, with jinja2content, one can do the following:

File my-cool-article.md

# My cool title

My cool content.

{% from 'img_desc.html' import img_desc %}
{{ img_desc("/images/my-cool-image.png",
    "This is a cool tooltip",
    "This is a very cool image.") }}

Where file img_desc.html contains:

{% macro img_desc(src, title='', desc='') -%}
<div class="img-desc">
  <p><img src="{{ src }}" title="{{ title }}"></p>
  {% if desc %}
  <p><em>{{ desc }}</em></p>
  {% endif %}
</div>
{%- endmacro %}

The result will be:

# My cool title

My cool content.

<div class="img-desc">
  <p><img src="/images/my-cool-image.png" title="This is a cool tooltip"></p>
  <p><em>This is a very cool image.</em></p>
</div>

After this, the Markdown will be rendered into HTML and only then the theme’s templates will be applied.

In this way, Markdown articles have more control over the content that is passed to the theme’s article.html template, without the need to pollute the Markdown with HTML. Another added benefit is that now img_desc is reusable across articles.

Note that templates rendered with jinja2content can contain Markdown as well as HTML, since they are added before the Markdown content is converted to HTML.

Installation

This plugin can be installed via:

pip install pelican-jinja2content

Configuration

This plugin accepts the setting JINJA2CONTENT_TEMPLATES which should be set to a list of paths relative to PATH (the main content directory, usually "content"). jinja2content will look for templates inside these directories, in order. If they are not found in any, the theme’s templates folder is used.

Extending

This plugin is structured such that it should be quite easy to extend readers for other file types to also render Jinja template logic. It should be sufficient to create a new reader class that inherits from the JinjaContentMixin and then your desired reader class. See class definitions in the source for examples.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome and much appreciated. Every little bit helps. You can contribute by improving the documentation, adding missing features, and fixing bugs. You can also help out by reviewing and commenting on existing issues.

To start contributing to this plugin, review the Contributing to Pelican documentation, beginning with the Contributing Code section.

Acknowledgements

• Original implementation by @joachimneu and re-worked by @Leonardo.
• Updated to support reST and HTML input by @micahjsmith.
• Converted to new plugin format by @justinmayer.
• Replaces pelican-jinja2content, which had become unmaintained.