Drupal is well and good, but I don't like editing pages in a web UI. Or storing them in MySQL. Or configuring workflows. Is that a problem? Can I still use Drupal?

Mr. Hyde is the evil version of Dr. Jekyll -- it's a Drupal module that lets you create Markdown files and store them in a git repo... but it displays them as pages in a Drupal site. This allows you to use Drupal's general layout engine (themes and blocks) while tracking content in git (and using stock workflows like Github PR's or Gitlab MR's).

Install the module

$ cd sites/all/modules
$ git clone https://github.com/totten/hyde
$ cd hyde
$ composer install
$ drush en hyde

Note: It should be OK to install via composer require totten/hyde, but I haven't done enough with D7+Composer to speak to that.

Initialize the content root

$ cd <drupal-private-data-folder>
$ mkdir hyde
$ cd hyde

Of course, this folder should probably be a git repo. You could initialize a new repo here (git init) or clone an existing repo.

Tip: If you want to store content in another folder, override the value of hyde_path by calling drush vset hyde_path /path/to/doc/root or editing settings.php.

Add a new page

$ echo "Hello __world__" > hello-world.md
$ drush cc all
$ curl https://example.org/hello-world
$ git add hello-world.md
$ git commit

Markdown metadata

In Jekyll syntax, a Markdown file can begin with a YAML metadata. In this example, we set the title of the HTML page with a little extra metadata:

---
title: "The future of old school content"
---
# Old is the new new
Because sometimes you like to write content in a simple way.

# Git is the new CMS
Because sometimes you like to write content in a simple way.

Supported fields:

• title: The main HTML page title

Issues/Limitations/FIXMEs

There are several things that one might do if they really cared about this. Right now, I'm trying to write this quickly, so I don't really care.

• Add an admin form for manging hyde_path
• Test/implement page-cache support.
• Rework as Drupal entity. If a file is writeable, allow editing the body via CLI or GUI. If a file is not writeable, then don't.
• Add more options to the metadata for:
  • Setting permissions
  • Changing layouts
• Want to be sure that only CLI users can manipulate Markdown files? Just set the file-permissions appropriately.

Coding style

This repo is a safe space for godawful code that I wrote in 15 minutes after drinking some beer.