A few gotchas

A few gotchas

When creating a website with wmk, you might want to keep the following things in mind lest they surprise you:

• The order of operations is as follows: (1) Copy files from static/; (2) run asset pipeline; (3) render Mako templates from templates; (4) render markdown content from content. As a consequence, later steps may overwrite files placed by earlier steps. This is intentional but definitely something to keep in mind.

• For the run and watch actions when -q or --quick is specified as a modifier, wmk.py uses timestamps to prevent unnecessary re-rendering of templates, markdown files and SCSS sources. The check is rather primitive and does not take account of such things as shortcodes or changed dependencies in the template chain. As a rule, --quick is therefore not recommended unless you are working on a small, self-contained set of content files.

• If templates or shortcodes have been changed it may sometimes be necessary to clear out the page rendering cache with wmc c. During development you may want to add use_cache: no to the wmk_config.yaml file. Also, some pages should never be cached, in which case it is a good idea to add no_cache: true to their frontmatter.

• If files are removed from source directories the corresponding files in htdocs/ will not disappear automatically. You have to clear them out manually – or simply remove the entire directory and regenerate.