Posts

Blogging is a key part of Bridgetown. You can write blog posts as text files and Bridgetown provides everything you need to turn those into a blog. Under the hood, posts are simply a built-in type of collection, so you’re not obligated to use them if a custom collection makes more sense.

Table of Contents

The Posts Folder

The _posts folder in your source folder (src) is where your blog posts live. Typically you’d write posts in Markdown (technically, the superset syntax provided by Kramdown), but standard HTML is also supported. Markdown posts end in the .md extension, but you can also use .markdown if you prefer.

Creating Posts

To create a post, add a file to your _posts directory with the following format:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.EXT

Where YEAR is a four-digit number, MONTH and DAY are both two-digit numbers, and EXT is the file extension representing the markup format used in the file. For example, the following are examples of valid post filenames:

2018-12-31-new-years-eve-is-awesome.md
2019-09-12-how-to-write-a-blog.html

All blog post files must begin with front matter which is typically used to set a title, layout, or other metadata. Here’s an example:

---
layout: post
title: "Welcome to Bridgetown!"
---

# Welcome

**Hello world**, this is my first Bridgetown blog post.

I hope you like it!

You can configure permalinks for full control of the output URL of your blog posts, such as https://mydomain.com/vacation/2019/disney-world. Read all about it in the permalinks documentation.

Use the post_url Liquid tag to link to other posts without having to worry about the URLs breaking when the site permalink style changes.

Including images and resources

At some point, you’ll want to include images, downloads, or other digital assets along with your text content. One common solution is to create a folder in the root of the source folder called something like assets, into which any images, files or other resources are placed. Then, from within any post, they can be linked to using the site’s root as the path for the asset to include. The best way to do this depends on the way your site’s (sub)domain and path are configured, but here are some simple examples in Markdown:

Including an image asset in a post:

... which is shown in the screenshot below:
![My helpful screenshot](/assets/screenshot.jpg)

Linking to a PDF for readers to download:

... you can [get the PDF](/assets/mydoc.pdf) directly.

Bundling posts and assets together

As of Bridgetown 0.9, you can also create a folder in _posts and save both your post content file (whether Markdown or HTML) and your assets in that folder. This is useful in cases where you’re authoring your content in an app that can display images inline and you wish to export the content and images all together.

For example:

├── src
│   ├── _posts
│   │   ├── post-bundle
│   │   │   ├── 2020-05-10-my-awesome-post.md
│   │   │   ├── download.pdf
│   │   │   └── image.jpg

Then in your post, you could simply reference each filename directly:

[Download](download.pdf) my PDF!

Here's an image! ![img](image.jpg)

This only works if you specify a particular permalink for your blog post, so that the final HTML file lives in the same output folder as the assets. For example:

permalink: /post-bundle/:slug

This would then render out the output/post-bundle/my-awesome-post.html file along with output/post-bundle/download.pdf and output/post-bundle/image.jpg. Or you could do permalink: /post-bundle/ and then the final path would simply be output/post-bundle/index.html.

Displaying an index of posts

Creating an index of posts on a top page is easy thanks to Liquid tags. Here’s a simple example of how to create a list of links to your blog posts:

<ul>
  {% for post in site.posts %}
    <li>
      <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
    </li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>

Note that the post variable only exists inside the for loop above. If you wish to access the currently-rendering page variables (the variables of the page that has the for loop in it), use the page variable instead.

If you have a large number of posts, it’s likely you’ll want to use the Pagination feature to make it easy to browse through a limited number of posts per page.

Categories and Tags

Bridgetown has built-in support for categories and tags in blog posts. The difference between categories and tags is a category can be part of the URL for a post whereas a tag cannot.

To use these, first set your categories and tags in front matter:

---
layout: post
title: A Trip
categories:
  - blog
  - travel
tags: hot summer
---

Bridgetown makes the categories available via site.categories. Iterating over site.categories on a page gives you another array with two items, the first item is the name of the category and the second item is an array of posts in that category.

{% for category in site.categories %}
  <h3>{{ category[0] }}</h3>
  <ul>
    {% for post in category[1] %}
      <li><a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a></li>
    {% endfor %}
  </ul>
{% endfor %}

For tags it’s exactly the same except the variable is site.tags.

You could also specify a single category per post with the category variable instead:

category: dessert

Post excerpts

You can access a snippet of a posts’s content by using excerpt variable on a post. By default this is the first paragraph of content in the post, however it can be customized by setting a excerpt_separator variable in front matter or bridgetown.config.yml.

---
excerpt_separator: <!--more-->
---

Excerpt with multiple paragraphs

Here's another paragraph in the excerpt.
<!--more-->
Out-of-excerpt

Here’s an example of outputting a list of blog posts with an excerpt:

<ul>
  {% for post in site.posts %}
    <li>
      <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
      {{ post.excerpt }}
    </li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>

Hiding In-Progress Posts (aka Drafts)

If you have a posts you’re still working on and don’t want to publish it yet, you can use the published front matter variable. Set it to false and your post won’t be published on standard builds:

---
title: My draft post
published: false
---

To preview your site with unpublished posts or pages, run either bridgetown serve or bridgetown build with the --unpublished or -U option. This will build and output all content files even if published is set to false in the front matter.

If you like keeping draft posts together in one place, all you need to do is create a _posts/drafts folder, put your posts in there, and then use front matter defaults to set published to false:

# bridgetown.config.yml

defaults:
  - scope:
      path: _posts/drafts
    values:
      published: false

Next: Front Matter