Bonsai, Managing pages

Each page is stored in its own directory, it uses a .yml file to hold its textual content. That same .yml file is also used to infer the template that will be used for your page. For example, default.yml will use the default.mustache template.

content/
  index/
    default.yml

The index page will use the default.mustache template.

Page variables

Pages have variables for meta information, also, the key and value pairs in the .yml file will be cast to variables.

For example - A .yml file containing the following:

:title: "All about growing a Bonsai"
:body: |
  A bonsai is very difficult care for...
  You will need to obtain the agilty of 
  a cat and the strength of a bear

:skills:
  - 
    :description: "Agility"
    :animal: "Cat"
  -
    :description: "Strength"
    :animal: "Bear"

Will have variables of {{title}} and {{body}} containing strings, {{skills}} will be a hash, which can be used to iterate over to list the skills required to become a bonsai sensei.

Pre-defined meta variables

You will also have access to variables that contain details about the page in context.

permalink - The full routable path to the page, eg: /about/our/services
slug - The last chunk of a page name, this will also be HTML/URI safe
name - A titlecased version of the slug
parent - The direct parent page
children - All of the non-floating pages underneath the current page
siblings - All of the non-floating pages at the same level. Does not include ‘self’
ancestors - Each parent up the tree - Useful for writing breadcrumbs
navigation - Top level non-floating pages

“Magic” variables

A page that contains subdirectories will receive additional variables, for example:

content/
  index/
    default.yml
    images/
      sansei.jpg
      miaggi.jpg

The index page will have an array variable of images, it will contain a hash:

[
  {
    :name => "sansei.jpg", 
    :path => "/index/images/sansei.jpg", 
    :disk_path => ".../bonsai-site/content/index/images/sansei.jpg"
  },
  {
    :name => "miaggi.jpg", 
    :path => "/index/images/miaggi.jpg", 
    :disk_path => ".../bonsai-site/content/index/images/miaggi.jpg"
  }
]

This gives you great power and flexibility - You are able to handle pages with different contexts, based on the files that they are able to use or simply iterate over the magic asset variables to render product/project/logo images.