Jigsaw – Static Sites for Laravel Developers

Creating Your Site's Content

Markdown

Have some pages you'd rather write in Markdown than Blade? We know the feeling.

Using Markdown in Jigsaw is as simple as using a .markdown or .md extension, and specifying a few details in YAML front matter.

For example, say you have this layout and you'd like to populate the content section using Markdown:

1<html>
2    <head><!-- ... --></head>
3    <body>
4        @yield('content')
5    </body>
6</html>

If that layout was named master in the _layouts folder, you could create a Markdown page that used this layout like so:

1---
2extends: _layouts.master
3section: content
4---
5 
6# My awesome heading!
7 
8My awesome content!

The end result would be a generated page that looked like this:

1<html>
2    <head><!-- ... --></head>
3    <body>
4        <h1>My awesome heading!</h1>
5        <p>My awesome content!</p>
6    </body>
7</html>

Custom front matter variables

Imagine you have a layout named post.blade.php in your _layouts folder that looks like this:

_layouts/post.blade.php

1@extends('_layouts.master')
2 
3@section('content')
4    <h1>{{ $page->title }}</h1>
5    <h2>by {{ $page->author }}</h2>
6 
7    @yield('postContent')
8@endsection

You can populate the title and author variables by adding custom keys to the YAML front matter:

my-post.md

1---
2extends: _layouts.post
3section: postContent
4title: "Jigsaw is awesome!"
5author: "Adam Wathan"
6---
7 
8Jigsaw is one of the greatest static site generators of all time.

...which would generate this:

1<html>
2    <head><!-- ... --></head>
3    <body>
4        <h1>Jigsaw is awesome!</h1>
5        <h2>by Adam Wathan</h2>
6 
7        <p>Jigsaw is one of the greatest static site generators of all time.</p>
8    </body>
9</html>

Formatting dates

The YAML processor converts any dates that it finds in a Markdown file's front matter into integer timestamps. When outputting a date variable in your Blade template, you can use PHP's date() function to specify a date format. For example:

my-post.md

1---
2extends: _layouts.post
3section: postContent
4date: 2018-02-16
5---

_layouts/post.blade.php

1<p>The formatted date is {{ date('F j, Y', $post->date) }}</p>

Specifying a permalink

You can specify a permalink in the YAML front matter to override the default path of a file when your site is built. This can be used, for example, to create a custom 404 page that is output to 404.html (instead of the default 404/index.html):

source/404.md

1---
2extends: _layouts.master
3section: content
4permalink: 404.html
5---
6 
7### Sorry, that page does not exist.