Creating Pages

In PieCrust, creating pages is a matter of creating a text file in the correct place with the correct name. This mostly depends on the page sources you’re using, but we can go over how it works for the sources involved in the default content model.

We will also go over the chef prepare command, which semi-automates the process of creating pages.

Overview

All pages sources have a file-system endpoint, which is usually a sub-directory of your website’s root directory. They will look for pages inside that endpoint, and load any file that matches that source’s naming convention.

Generally speaking, page sources will load any files that:

  • have a .html extension.
  • have an extension listed in the site/auto_formats website setting (by default, those are .md and .textile, for Markdown and Textile formatted pages respectively).

Different sources have different conventions — mostly naming of the page files. We’ll look at how it works for the sources in the default content model. To learn about other sources, see the page sources reference.

Default content model pages

Simple pages

When using the default content model, PieCrust will load simple pages out of the pages/ endpoint. The relative path of a page from the pages/ directory will be that page’s slug, i.e. its URL, minus the site’s root, and minus any optional arguments.

Since there are often no arguments, and the default’s site root is /, it’s pretty much the same as the page’s URL. So a page located at pages/cooks/ludovic will have an URL of /cooks/ludovic.

Running chef prepare page cooks/ludovic will create that page for you, which means you don’t have to bother with creating intermediate sub-directories or whatnot.

Blog posts

When using the default content model, PieCrust will load blog posts out of the posts/ endpoint. There are different naming conventions available depending on the site/posts_fs setting:

  • flat: YYYY-MM-DD_post-slug.ext
  • shallow: YYYY/MM-DD_post-slug.ext
  • hierarchy: YYYY/MM/DD_post-slug.ext

Where:

  • YYYY, MM, and DD are the year, month, and day of the post, respectively.
  • post-slug is, well, the post’s slug (i.e. the part of the URL that comes after the site’s root).
  • ext is an extension that’s either html, or something in the site’s auto-formats (usually md for Markdown texts and textile for Textile texts).

Running chef prepare post my-new-blog-post will create a new blog post with a slug of my-new-blog-post, dated today. This makes it quick to write a new blog post!