Chronicle.md

Version: 0.9

Chronicle is a small Markdown blog engine. It serves up weblog style sites based on folders of Markdown and other plain text files.

How it works

Place your pages and post files in some sort of directory structure.

index.php <-- this is your "home" theme
site.json <-- these are your site settings
blog/
	2012/01/some-post.md
	2011/05/another-post.md
projects/
	more-content.md 

By default Chronicle displays a list of posts (for /). Standard template functions are available for displaying post parts, lists, next/prev, and so on.

Its templates are simple PHP (similar to WP templates, but not split into pieces by default):

<?= $site->settings->name; ?>

A full example is available as used for my weblog warpedvisions.org: https://github.com/robotpony/warpedvisions.org

Requirements

• PHP 5.3+ (w/json)
• Apache with rewrites enabled
• PrestoPHP 1.1+
• Markdown extra

Installation

1. Install PrestoPHP, Markdown Extra, and Chronicle to the lib folder in a web root (see gitmodules below)
2. Symlink combobulate.php to the web root.
3. Copy the example htaccess file to the web root.

Your web root will now look something like:

chronicle	-> lib/chronicle.md/chronicle.php
.htaccess
index.php (Main template)
site.json (Settings)
blog/     (Markdown blog posts)
pages/    (More markdown things)
js
lib
styles

URLs are simply the expected path to given Markdown files (/blog/2012/some-file.md) or to the folder listing (/blog/).

Git modules

[submodule "lib/presto"]
	path = lib/presto
	url = git@github.com:robotpony/Presto.git
[submodule "lib/markdown"]
	path = lib/markdown
	url = https://github.com/gavroche/php-markdown-extra.git
[submodule "lib/chronicle.md"]
	path = lib/chronicle.md
	url = git@github.com:robotpony/chronicle.md.git

Features

1. Templates are standard PHP files arranged in folders as if they were your site. One file per directory (or just one at the root)
2. Listings are available for any given root.
3. A simple template API is available.

API

Site settings

Loaded from site.json, with defaults applied to the standard set.

<?= $chronicle->settings->site->name ?>
<?= $chronicle->settings->site->any_variable_you_add ?>

If a configuration value isn't found, a blank is returned.

If you want to sort the files that chronicle loads by time, add this to your site.json:

• "site": "modified"
  • This sorts files by file modified date

This can be helpful when you want to display blog posts in order.

The loop

Showing posts (one or more) is similar to WordPress:

<?php while ( ( $p = $chronicle->nextPost() ) ) { ?>
	<section>

		<h1><a href="<?= $p->url ?>" title="Published on <?= $p->published ?>">
			<?= $p->title ?></a>
		</h1>

		<?= $p->content ?>

	</section>
<?php } ?>

Other template APIs can be made available on request.