With Pelican, how to set or access variables between Python code and themes?

Question

I need to pass down the original source file name (*.md file) into the sidebar.html. How can I do that?

From this site (http://pelican.readthedocs.org/en/3.6.3/themes.html), I understand some variables are available, and all capital letter variables in pelicanconf.py files are also available, but I don't know how to get the information such as the original source file in the theme files.

Answer 1

I think there might be a simpler way, but using jinja filter works fine for me ( http://linkpeek.com/blog/how-to-add-a-custom-jinja-filter-to-pelican.html)

Steps to take:

Pre-setup

I make the name of the original markup file to be in the format YEAR-MONTH-DAY-NAME to be recovered from the url of the page.

Create a filter

The filter is given the url, and from the url, I can recover the original source md file path.

def tosource(url):
    # example input
    # posts/2014/01/26/python-unittest-structure/index.html
    # posts/2014/01/26/ocaml-vs-java/index.html
    # posts/2014/01/25/why-ocaml-comparison-with-python/index.html

    if url.startswith("posts"):
        (posts, year, month, day, name) = url.split('/')[:-1]
        res = "%s/%s/%s-%s-%s-%s.md" % (year, month, year, month, day, name)
    else:
        res = "/" # implement later
    return res

Update pelicanconf.py

Teach pelican the name and location of the filter.

import sys
sys.path.append('.')

import sourcename
JINJA_FILTERS = {'sourcename':sourcename.tosource}

OPENCONTENT = "open:///pelican/knowledge_blog/content"

As is written in http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.5.0/themes.html#theming-pelican, all capital letter variables in the conf file are accessible in the theme files.

Update sidebar.html

I added one line of code in sidebar.html to use the Jinja filter for getting the original md file path.

Click to <a href="{{ OPENCONTENT }}/{{ output_file|sourcename }}">Edit</a>

Generate the html

Run make html and test.