middleman-plaintext

Generate plaintext versions of resources. Inspired heavily by John Gruber at daring fireball, displaying the raw markdown used to generate a post by appending .text to the URL. (eg, http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/improved_regex_for_matching_urls.text)

Usage

Out of the box the extension expects layout/layout.text.erb to be the layout for plaintext rendering of resources, and it also will ignore all resources.

You'll want to tell it which resources to generate a plaintext version of using the handle_file option, which expects a ruby block.

This basic example, will render all resources with layout/layout.text.erb, by putting the following in config.rb:

activate :plaintext do |c|
  c.handle_file = -> (resource) { true }
end

A slightly more real-world example overrides the template name, and only "plaintexts" HTML files in the post/ directory:

activate :plaintext do |c|
  c.layout = "blog_post.text"
  c.handle_file = lambda do |resource|
    resource.path.start_with?("posts/") && resource.path.end_with?(".html")
  end
end

You can also change the output filename with the filename option. Defaults to index.text.

Helpful things to know

  • Current resource is current_page in the layout as usual

  • Link to the current page

    URI.join(app.config.site_url, current_page.path.sub("index.text", ""))

  • Render the source file completely raw, without the frontmatter

    Middleman::FileRenderer.new(@app, current_page.file_descriptor[:full_path].to_s).template_data_for_file

Changelog

v0.8.1

  • Turn output filename into an option, filename

v0.8.0

  • Initial release. Generates index.text files based on handler with specified layout.