Panini 2.0 Preview

This is a work in progress.

The second version of Panini will bring it up to punching weight with other static site tools.

Pages

• Cross-referencing pages: a page has access to a pages variable, which is an array of metadata on all pages in the site. With this, you can dynamically generate navigation.

Data

• More format support: data files can now be JSON, YAML, CSON, or a .js file with module.exports. A JavaScript file can also be a function that returns data, or an asynchronous function that returns a Promise containing data.
• Deep merging of page data. when page-specific data is combined with global data, objects are deeply merged.

Localization

• Translation strings: locale-specific data files containing translation strings can be created. Within pages, the {{translate}} helper allows you to reference a specific string.
• Automatic page generation: when you create multiple locales for your site, each page will be rendered multiple times and dropped into folders for each locale, i.e. /en/index.html, /is/index.html.
• Locale-specific pages: a page can be placed into a locale-specific folder, such as /en/about.hbs, and that page will not be translated into other languages.

Collections

Page Transforms

Rendering Engines

• Pug and EJS support: in addition to the default of Handlebars, the rendering engine can also be switched to Pug or EJS.
• More built-in helpers: for Pug and EJS, the template-helpers library is built-in. For Handlebars, the more specific handlebars-helpers library is included. This means each engine has access to over a hundred helper functions out of the box.

Configuration

• No configuration required: the only things you need to run Panini are input and output folders. By default, Panini will look for pages, layouts, partials, etc. in default folder names: pages, layouts, partials, etc.

API

A better programmatic API has been added.

const Panini = require('panini');

const p = new Panini('src', 'dist');

// Build once
await p.build();
console.log('Build done.');

// Build and watch for changes
p.watch();

CLI

The CLI has been simplified. You just specify input and output folders, and optionally a --watch flag.

$ panini src dist

Options can be set with a panini key on your project's package.json.

Breaking Changes

• Configuration
  • Instead of defining globs of files to pick up (e.g., src/pages/**/*.html, a folder is set instead (e.g., just pages).
  • Folders for specific features (pages, layouts, partials, etc.) must now be immediate subfolders of the root project folder.
  • Removed the ability to specify multiple folders per feature with an array.
• Handlebars
  • #ifPage and #unlessPage have been replaced by the more generic currentPage, which returns a boolean.
  • #code has been replaced by #highlight in handlebars-helpers.
  • #ifEqual has been replaced by eq in handlebars-helpers.