Usage¶

Folder structure¶

A Melthon project has following folder structure. Folder names can be changed as option to the melthon command.

templates

This is the only mandatory folder. It contains your Mako tempates (*.mako) which will be rendered into HTML pages. This folder supports subfolders. To prevent a file from rendering, like base template or reusable parts, name your template *.template.mako or *.part.mako.

If you want to render the same template multiple times, use suffix *.repeat.mako. See Repeated templates for more info.

static

This folder contents will be copied to the root of the output folder. You can use this folder for static assets like CSS, JavaScript, images, …

data

If you want to have certain information available in a template, e.g. a telephone number, you can provide this information in YAML files. Each YAML file inside the data folder will be available as data['<FILENAME>'] in your templates. E.g. general.yml will become data['general'].

middleware

In this folder, you can provide custom middleware. The middleware will run before and after the rendering of your site. It has access to the context. Please use following template:

from melthon.middleware import Middleware


class Middleware1(Middleware):
  def before(self, context):
    # <YOUR CUSTOM CODE>
    return context

  def after(self, context):
    # <YOUR CUSTOM CODE>
    return context

You can define multiple middlewares (classes) in the same file. Method before or after can be omitted in case it’s not required.

output

This folder will contain the rendered result

Command options¶

Melthon currently supports 2 commands: melthon build and melthon clean. Please use melthon --help and melthon <command> --help to list the available options.

Repeated templates¶

To render the same template multiple times, use suffix *.repeat.mako for your template. Next to this, you’ll have to supply a repeat.yml in the root of your site.

This file contains the mapping between your template and the collection in the data files. E.g. to use the list events in file data/general.yml for template events.repeat.mako, you have to provide following repeat.yml:

events: “/general/events”

Melthon expects an attribute slug for each item in the repeat collection. The slug defines the output name of the repeated page. The whole item will be passed in variable page inside the template.

Tip: To have an index page for your repeated pages, you can specify a template with the same name. E.g. events.mako and events.repeat.mako

You can check https://github.com/JenswBE/python-melthon/tree/master/tests/test_site if you want an example of repeated pages.