Adding the equivalent of Hugo's `new` command

Feature requests
1

I could have sworn there was already a thread on this topic, but I cannot find it for the life of me so I’m opening this one again. Sorry if this is a duplicate.

I personally really liked Hugo’s command new and kinda missed it in Zola. Espeically because I personally have a lot of sections that have a very specific structure but also the index.md file has specific tags so having something to copy all of that easily is a big plus for me, though I admit it’s just a creature comfort thing.

The specific use case for me right now is making new publications. Every time I make a new publication it gets its own section for asset colocation, and has a bunch of fields like abstract, authors,pdf,bibfile,venue. Additionally it also has a sub folder called images for images about that publication.

I’ve added an archetypes folder, after Hugo’s function of the same name. This folder must at least contain a file called default.md, which at the moment just looks like this:

---
title = "%TITLE%"
date = %ISODATE%
draft = true
---

Right now I have an implementation that works like this:

  • zola new temp-file-with-title.md will copy archetypes/default.md over to content/temp.md and change it’s title to Temp file with title and the date to the current local ISO date.
  • zola new type/subtype/specific-title.md will look to use the file archetypes/type/subtype/default.md as a template
    • if it finds it it will do the same as before. if archetypes/type/subtype/ contains other files or folders those get recursively copied over to the target directory without modification.
    • if it does not find it, it will still create the file along with the folders if necessary but use archetypes/default.md as a template
  • if content/type/subtype/specific-title.md already exists, then zola new type/subtype/specific-title.md will do nothing

So far the implementation has tests for the most important functionality, but I don’t have coverage stats at the moment. I will be adding some documentation on it in the next few days if possible. The template functions that it supports are very simple atm but I figured it was a good enough start. Can I submit a PR with this?

2

That’s a cool addition!

Question though, if an archetype is not found would it be safer to not create the file and explain why? At least a warning would be appropriate. For instance what if there was a typo, then someone gets the default archetype when they really did have some custom archetype? That could be confusing.

3

if it uses the default archetype because the provided one can’t be found it does show a warning, but you might be right that at that point it’s better to do nothing. It’s hard to say why the archetype couldn’t be found though

4

There won’t be a zola new for the foreseeable future because I don’t want to add the concept of archetypes and it’s just simpler to copy an existing file.

5

To bad that you’re not open to the idea. If anyone else is interested in this feature I plan to keep it up to date for a while on my fork.

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