Page configuration

Every page file can have a “header” part in which you specify some configuration values. This header is written using the YAML syntax, and is delimited with 3 dashes at the beginning and the end. Here’s a simple example:

---
title: My awesome new page
layout: mytemplate
---
Here go the contents of the page.
Blah blah blah.

This header specifies the title for the page (“My awesome page”) and the template to use for rendering that page (templates are covered later).

Anything you specify here will be exposed to the template system, so if you have the following header:

foo: bar

…then you can use {{ foo }} several times on the page, and each time it will be replaced by “bar”. Then you can easily replace “bar” with “beer” in one place. More importantly, that’s a way to push stuff “up” to the layout pages, because all those values will be given to them via the template system. That’s for instance how layouts can reference the title of the current page for the HTML head section.

Again, see the templating documentation for more info.

Reference

Here’s a list of the system values for a regular page:

• format: Specifies the text formatting to use for this page. PieCrust comes built-in with Markdown and Textile formatters (specify “markdown” and “textile” respectively). If you don’t want any formatting applied, specify “none”.

• content_type: Specified the type of content for the page. Can be html, xml, text (or txt), css, rss, atom or json. This will tell PieCrust to set the HTTP headers correctly before returning the page. When baking the site, this specifies what kind of file extension should be used.

• date_format: Specifies the date format for the date variable. See how to use blog posts. This value overrides the similar value from the site configuration.

• posts_per_page: The number of posts you will get through the pagination for displaying on the current page. See how to use blog posts. This value overrides the similar value from the site configuration.

• single_page: When this is set to true, no sub-pages will be created for this page, even if there are more posts to show. This is useful for things like RSS feeds. See how to use blog posts and RSS feeds.

  Also (and this is a bit convoluted, sorry about that), when baking a page with a non-HTML extension with pretty URLs enabled and single_page set to true, the output name will be simpler (matching the source file name) instead of using a directory with index.html in it to allow for sub-pages). See the documentation on pretty URLs for some more information about this.