PardallMarkdown - Reactive Markdown publishing framework, with nested hierarchies and instant content rebuilding

Repository

Introduction

PardallMarkdown is a reactive publishing framework and engine written in Elixir. Instant websites and documentation websites.

As opposed to static website generators (such as Hugo, Docusaurs and others), with PardallMarkdown, you don’t need to recompile and republish your application every time you write or modify new content. The application can be kept running indefinitely in production, while it watches a content folder for changes and the new content re-actively gets available for consumption by your application.

Video Demo and Tutorial

Example Phoenix LiveView Implementation

The example show cases a Blog + Documentation website structure and content (but it can be anything, since “blog” and “documentation” are just the name of the folders).

Features

  • Filesystem-based, with Markdown and static files support.
    • Markdown files are parsed as HTML.
  • FileWatcher, that detects new content and modification of existing content, which then automatically re-parses and rebuilds the content.
    • There is no need to recompile and redeploy the application nor the website, the new content is available immediately (depends on the interval set via :recheck_pending_file_events_interval, see below).
    • Created with Phoenix LiveView and Phoenix Channels in mind: create or modify a post or a whole new set of posts and they are immediately published in a website. Check out the demo repository.
  • Support for the content folders outside of the application, this way, new content files can be synced immediately from a source location (for example, your computer), and then picked up by the FileWatcher.
  • Automatic creation of table of contents from Markdown headers.
  • Infinite content hierarchies (categories and sub-categories, sections and sub-sections).
    • Different sets of custom hierarchies and post sets. For example, a website with Documentation, Blog, News and a Wiki, which in turn, have their own sub-hierarchies.
    • Custom sorting rules per hierarchy set. For example, posts in the Documentation hierarchy can be sorted by priority, Blog posts by date and Wiki posts by title.
  • Automatic creation of taxonomy trees and content tress.
    • Separate content trees, per root hierarchy are also created. For example, a content tree for the Documentation hierarchy, which contains links to all sub-hierarchies and posts.
  • Automatic creation of post navigation links (next and previous posts).
  • Freely embeddable metadata into posts as Elixir maps.
  • Hierarchy archive lists.
  • All the content and indexes are kept in an in-memory cache (Elixir’s ETS).
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This is an awesome project :heart: :heart: :heart:.

This is what I was waiting to revamp my blog and personal home page :slight_smile:

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Thank you! If you need help, please let me know.

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This is awesome, I wonder how many people are using this…

I’m thinking about using this to save some time.

I fear I will loose my blog posts in production, so perhaps a LiveView powered blog, backed by GitHub repo might be best for a beginner like me.


@AlfredBaudisch, how do I tackle tag cloud with this? (Perhaps adding a custom key and then accessing that from metadata is the correct approach? It’s just a guess based on your explanation video.)

And will it receive update for Phoenix 1.7?

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I updated it this year by fixing a few bugs and adding 1-2 small things, and I also updated the Phoenix demo implementation.

Notice that PardallMarkdown is independent of Phoenix, it works as an independent Elixir dep so you can use in any Elixir project, as an “instant reactive data” thing.

In any case the Phoenix demo was updated with 1.6:

But for now I archived the repository, as I’m not interested in using it anymore. In any case, feel free to use and contribute, it just works. :slight_smile: I can re-open the repository if contributors appear.

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