Tips n Tricks

Copying favicon/robots.txt

If you used the pelican-quickstart command to create a Makefile and want certain files copied to your web root — such as favicon.ico, robots.txt, or other files — create a folder called extras next to your Makefile and edit your Makefile to look like this:

 $(OUTPUTDIR)/%.html:
	$(PELICAN) $(INPUTDIR) -o $(OUTPUTDIR) -s $(CONFFILE) $(PELICANOPTS)
	if test -d $(BASEDIR)/extras; then cp $(BASEDIR)/extras/* $(OUTPUTDIR)/; fi

publish:
	$(PELICAN) $(INPUTDIR) -o $(OUTPUTDIR) -s $(PUBLISHCONF) $(PELICANOPTS)
	if test -d $(BASEDIR)/extras; then cp $(BASEDIR)/extras/* $(OUTPUTDIR)/; fi

or just add to pelican.conf next lines:

FILES_TO_COPY = (('extra/robots.txt', 'robots.txt'),
                 ('extra/favicon.ico', 'favicon.ico'),)

Make vs Rake vs Fabric

Make is available on almost any Unix-derived system but is old and can be clunky for building anything other than code. Many people prefer to use Rake (ruby make) or Fabric (a Pythonic tool for remote execution and deployment). Please post your examples and tips below for awesome development, testing, and deployment.

(good stuff goes here)

Generate sitemap.xml

This idea has come to me from Django framework. For generating sitemap.xml we will use a Jinja2 template. First, you should add sitemap.html to templates folder of your theme with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

{% for article in articles %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ SITEURL }}/{{ article.url }}</loc>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>

  {% for translation in article.translations %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ SITEURL }}/{{ translation.url }}</loc>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

{% for page in pages %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ SITEURL }}/{{ page.url }}</loc>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>

  {% for translation in page.translations %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ SITEURL }}/{{ translation.url }}</loc>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

</urlset>

Next, you should add this template to the list with direct templates. So make sure that DIRECT_TEMPLATES tuple in your settings.py contains sitemap.

# default value is ('index', 'tags', 'categories', 'archives')
# so we just add a 'sitemap'
DIRECT_TEMPLATES = ('index', 'tags', 'categories', 'archives', 'sitemap')

Finally, you should set SITEMAP_SAVE_AS variable for saving result as 'sitemap.xml'.

SITEMAP_SAVE_AS = 'sitemap.xml'