Beluki / MetaFiles

Like Flask-FlatPages or Flask-JSONPages, but reusable and library/markup agnostic.

About

MetaFiles is a small Python 3 library that maintains a collection of lazily cached static files with metadata and content, just like Flask-FlatPages and Flask-JSONPages do for Flask.

The main difference is that MetaFiles is library agnostic. Both the metadata and the body can be parsed with any library (YAML, JSON, Markdown, Jinja2) and it's not tied to a Flask application. It can be used with Flask, Django, Bottle or any other framework.

Additionally, it's reusable, meaning you can create multiple instances of MetaFiles for different folders using different parsers in a single application.

Installation and usage

MetaFiles is a single, small Python 3.3+ file with no dependencies other than the Python 3 standard library. You can just include it in your projects or install it using setuptools:

$ cd Source
$ python setup.py install

The usage is very similar to that of Flask-FlatPages. Instead of using the Flask application configuration, the options are specified when creating the MetaFiles instance:

from MetaFiles import MetaFiles

# We will be using Markdown as markup
# and YAML as the metadata parser:
import markdown
import yaml

posts = MetaFiles(
    root = 'posts',
    extensions = ('.md', '.markdown'),
    encoding = 'utf-8-sig',
    meta_render = yaml.load,
    body_render = markdown.markdown
)

# Load all posts.
# Can be called multiple times to reload.
# Preserves previous content in case of an error/exception.
posts.load()

# Print the post titles (assuming a title key in the metadata):
for post in posts:
    print(post.meta['title'])

Portability

MetaFiles is tested on Windows 7 and 8 and on Debian (both x86 and x86-64) using Python 3.3+. Older versions are not supported.

Status

This program is finished!

MetaFiles is feature-complete and has no known bugs. Unless issues are reported I plan no further development on it other than maintenance.

License

Like all my hobby projects, this is Free Software. See the Documentation folder for more information. No warranty though. Because it's based on the work of Simon Sapin in Flask-FlatPages it uses the same license.