Introduction pages for categories in Pelican

Question

I would like to build my personal web pages in Pelican, but I am missing one functionality. I would love to have an introductory page for some/all categories on the pages.

For example - I would like to build a page for my grant project, where posts are related to activities and/or published papers, but I would also like a single page saying something about the grant project and keep this page as the title page of this category.

Is this possible (easily) in Pelican framework? If not, can you suggest better static pages framework that works in combination Markdown+Python?

Answer 1

This is actually very easy with pelican. The plugin Auto Pages defines three extra content folders: One for authors, one for categories and one for tags.

Say you, John Smith, wanted to have extra information about your person when clicking on your name. Then, you would add a file called authors/john-smith{.rst|.md} with this extra information. No HTML, but only the contents you want to provide about your person. These contents are then read in, transformed and presented to the template engine as author.page.

Now it is about your templates to also use this variable. In my theme, I simply modified theme/templates/author.html to not show the combination of "featured article" and "other articles" related to my author, but to show author.page.content and "all articles" related to my author instead.

Short extract of my theme/templates/author.html:

<aside id="featured" class="body">
      <article>
          <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ author.url }}">{{ author }}</a></h1>
          {{ author.page.content }}
      </article>
</aside>
<section id="content" class="body">
      <!-- removed the apostrophe for SO highlighting reasons-->
      <h1>Authors articles</h1>
      <hr/>
      <ol id="posts-list" class="hfeed" start="{{ articles_paginator.per_page - 1}}">
      {% for article in articles_page.object_list %}
          <li><article class="hentry">
              <header>
                  <h1><a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ article.url }}" rel="bookmark"
                          title="Permalink to {{ article.title|striptags }}">{{ article.title }}</a></h1>
              </header>

              {% include 'article_infos.html' %}
              {{ article.summary }}
              <a class="readmore" href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ article.url }}">read more</a>
              {% include 'comments.html' %}
          </article></li>
      {% endfor %}
      </ol>
      {% if articles_page.has_other_pages() %}
          {% include 'pagination.html' %}
      {% endif %}
</section>

You can do the exact same thing for categories and tags using the procedure described above. For the template, just use the existing index.html and adapt it to your needs.