Monad

Monad is a simple, blog aware, static site generator based on Jekyll.

The main feature it adds is as follows:

• Support data sources
• Support posts from external sources(TBD)

Data Sources

Data Source enables you to load data from external sources, such as web, file system, databases and then use them inside views.

Note that Jekyll now automatically load yaml files under _data directory. You're recommended to use that feature) unless it can't fulfill your requirements.

Monad supports two built-in data sources:

• YAML from local file system
• JSON from web

And it's easy to roll your own data source driver.

JSON

In ordre to use json from web in your site, set following in _config.yml file:

data_sources:
  - name: albums # will be used as site.albums to access data, no spaces allowed
    type: json
    url: http://www.example.com/albums.json # must be http or https

Then, inside html you can access the data as following:

{% for album in site.albums %}
...
{% endfor %}

YAML

To define a yaml data source, set following in _config.yml file:

data_sources:
  - name: products # will be used as site.products to access data, no spaces allowed
    type: yaml
    path: _database/products.yml # must be on local file system

Then, inside html you can access the data as following:

{% for product in site.products %}
...
{% endfor %}

Custom drivers

The skeleton of your driver should be as follows:

module Jekyll
  module Drivers
    class XxxDriver
      # source options are passed in as an Hash
      def initialize(options)
      end

      # return the loaded data as Array or Hash or a nested structure of Array and Hash
      def load
      end
    end
  end
end

After you've implemented the code, put the source file inside _plugins directory.

Then in _config.yml, you can use the driver as follows:

data_sources:
  - name: students
    type: xxx

If the type is xxx, Monad assumes the corresponding driver is Monad::Drivers::XxxDriver. If the type is xxx_yyy, the driver should be Monad::Drivers::XxxYyyDriver, and so on.

Beside the obligatory name and type options, you can define any more options to be used inside the driver.