For the last week publishing in the Siteleaf interface has been powered by our API. This has been a requested feature by some of our users and ourselves. Its behavior is bit different than some of our other API endpoints, so let’s go over it.
To initiate a publish, make an authenticated POST request to the /sites/:id/publish endpoint.
$ curl -u "$API_KEY:$API_SECRET" -X POST \
http://api.siteleaf.com/v1/sites/$SITE_ID/publish
{"job_id":"e79af12c79ccd8866902d3dd"}
This triggers a publish and immediately returns a job ID (or returns an already running job ID if one exists). You can stop here if you’d like and Siteleaf will happily chug away in the background.
But the fun doesn’t stop there. You can optionally check in on publish progress using your job_id from above by making an authenticated GET request to the new /jobs/:id endpoint.
This endpoint, unlike our others, consistently returns Server Sent Events (SSE) instead of JSON documents (including errors). The data field is JSON encoded however. SSE is supported in all modern browsers and there are client libraries in a number of programming languages.
Additionally, job ID’s are kept for at least 30 minutes after completion so you can check in on a publish immediately or wait a bit.
Can’t wait to see what uses you come up with!
Publishing from the gem
First install the latest gem (0.9.23 as of writing)
You can group by any property like date, title, slug, even metadata and taxonomy. Here are a few real-world examples you may want to apply to your theme.
Liquid is the flexible templating language that powers themes on Siteleaf. While simple at first glance, there’s a lot of power under the hood for those wanting a greater level of control. In this new blog series, we’ll dive deeper and take a look at some advanced Liquid code and examples.
First up in this post, we’ll take a look at the sortfilter.
With any site, Siteleaf makes some general assumptions about your content. For example, posts are sorted by date (newest post shows first) and pages are sorted manually. In cases where this doesn’t fit your design, you can utilize the sort filter to order content any way you wish.
For example, here’s how we might sort pages by date:
{% assign sorted = pages | sort:"date" %}
This will sort in ascending order, but we could also choose descending order by adding reverse:
After building Siteleaf we took it upon ourselves to each rebuild our site using the service. I had previously used S3 with Jeykll and wanted to continue using it, but getting set up can be a bit of a mystery.
I’m assuming that you’re using Route 53 for DNS, and want to serve content from the root domain while having www redirect to it.
Amazon S3
Head to your S3 Console where you’ll make one bucket named after your root domain, and another with the www subdomain (e.g. example.com and www.example.com). Take note of the region you choose.
In my last article about Siteleaf, I wrote about what goes into porting a theme to Siteleaf from another CMS. This time around, I’ll show you how to write cleaner, less redundant templates through the use of layouts.
Today, I ported another theme to Siteleaf—Allison House’sMartin theme. I started porting themes to Siteleaf earlier this month as a self-imposed challenge. A friend of mine asked if a particular theme was possible to implement using Siteleaf and rather than answer with a simple ‘yes’, I responded with the ported theme. This was a great way of demonstrating Siteleaf’s adaptability, but also a useful exercise for myself to see where Siteleaf excels and where it falls short. In this post, I’ll walk through porting the Martin theme and show you just how easy it can be.
In the last Siteleaf post, we explored taxonomy and the many ways you could use it to extend your website. This time, we’ll break from templating and take a closer look at content—specifically, Markdown’s role in Siteleaf.
Last week, I wrote about metadata in Siteleaf and the variety of ways you could use it to customize your website. In this post, I’ll do the same, but with metadata’s much cooler, older brother—taxonomy.
In Siteleaf, metadata is pure key/value data attached to a site, page, or post. It provides a way to interact with templates beyond the basic usage of injecting title or body copy. Metadata can be used to set inline CSS values or specify the number of posts on a given page—the uses are endless. It’s also very flexible, down to a per-entity level. A post could have a completely unique set of metadata compared to that of its siblings. Let’s look at a few examples.
Last week, I ran through a number of Siteleaf’s most compelling features and provided a general overview of the service. This week, I’ll hold your hand through creating a basic website using Siteleaf.
Recently, we at Oak launched a new website publishing platform, called Siteleaf. In short, Siteleaf lets you build your website locally, edit its content in the cloud, and publish to static. In between, it’s so much more. Let me tell you about it.
Develop locally
As the one who makes the websites, you undoubtedly have a dev environment you prefer. All your code is version-controlled, your snippets are award-worthy, and you are one with your text editor. With Siteleaf, there’s no online WYSIWYG editor forced upon you, so you can build your website in the comfort of your own IDE. Use the Siteleaf gem to preview your templates locally using the data from the live server. When you’re ready to go live, simply push the files with the gem or upload them using the website. You can even use Pow or Anvil to preview your sites with a proper hostname.
