I've used the --- marker to split the page into sections, and each section must have a name (#section-one) for to be rendered. A page (or a post, or any other file) must have a template in the first, unnamed section. After which you can add custom attributes, identified with the '#' marker, which will be sent directly to the Handlebars model.
With in place, the application will apply the Handlebars renderer to the template file, plugging in all the values. A simplified template might look like this:
<html>
_ head stuff here_
<title>{{title}} by {{author}}</title>
<body>
<div class="container">{{{ section-one }}}</div>
<aside class="column2">{{{ section-two }}}</aside>
</body>
</html>
This is now working - and indeed the Cantilevers homepage has been built using this approach. It is generic, and not specific to index.html - well, almost.
In order to display the home page list of posts, the index.html.hbs template needs to have access to the structure.json file, which contains a complete list of all the posts on the website. This is different from how bascule did it, which would essentially recompile the project model in memory to generate the index page. Further work on this is required, but for now, it works.
And the terribly wrong thing...?
All those triple-dash separators inside the sample markdown block where playing havoc with my metadata parser. I may need to consider a different separator. Something weird. Maybe ▶�
Prev: Nearly self-hosting Next: Extending the API - (Re)generation