File organization

Inside a given working directory, wmk assumes the following subdirectories for content and output. They will be created if they do not exist:

• htdocs: The output directory. Rendered, processed or copied content is placed here, and wmk serve will serve files from this directory.

• templates: Mako templates. Templates with the extension .mhtml are rendered directly into htdocs as .html files (or another extension if the filename ends with .$ext\.mhtml, where $ext is a string consisting of 2-4 alphanumeric characters), unless their filename starts with a dot or underscore or contains the string base, or if they are directly inside a subdirectory named base. For details on context variables received by such stand-alone templates, see Context variables.

• content: typically markdown (*.md) and/or HTML (*.html*) content with YAML metadata, although other formats are also supported. For a full list, see Input formats above.

• Markdown (or other supported content) will be converted into HTML and then "wrapped" in a layout using the template specified in the metadata or md_base.mhtml by default.
• HTML files inside content are assumed to be fragments rather than complete documents. Accordingly, they will be wrapped in a layout just like the converted markdown. In general, such content is treated just like markdown files except that the markdown-to-html conversion step is skipped. For instance, shortcodes can be used normally, although they may not work as expected if they return markdown rather than HTML. (Complete HTML documents are best placed in static rather than content).
• The YAML metadata may be (a) at the top of the md/html document itself, inside a frontmatter block delimited by ---; (b) in a separate file with the same filename as the content file, but with an extra .yaml extension added; or (c) it may be in index.yaml files which are inherited by subdirectories and the files contained in them. For details, see Site, page and nav variables.
• The target filename will be index.html in a directory corresponding to the basename of the source file – unless pretty_path in the metadata is false or the name of the file itself is index.md or index.html (in which case the relative path is remains the same, except that the extension is of course changed to .html if the source is a markdown file).
• The processed content will be passed to the Mako template as a string in the context variable CONTENT, along with other metadata.
• A YAML datasource can be specified in the metadata block as LOAD; the data in this file will be added to the context. For further details on the context variables, see Context variables.

• Files that have other extensions than .md, .html or .yaml will be copied directly over to the (appropriate subdirectory of the) htdocs directory. This is so as to enable "bundling", i.e. keeping images and "attachments" together with related markdown files.

• data: YAML files for additional metadata. May be referenced in frontmatter data or used by templates. Other data files (CSV, SQLite, etc.) should typically also be placed here.

• py: Directory for Python files. This directory is automatically added to the front of sys.path before Mako is initialized, meaning that Mako templates can import modules placed here. Implicit imports are possible by setting mako_imports in the config file (see Configuration file). There are also two special files that may be placed here: wmk_autolaod.py in your project, and wmk_theme_autoload.py in the theme's py/ directory. If one or both of these is present, wmk imports a dict named autoload from them. This means that you can assign PREPROCESS and POSTPROCESS page actions by name (i.e. keys in the autoload dict) rather than as function references, which in turn makes it possible to specify them in the frontmatter directly rather than having to do it via a shortcode. (For more on PRE- and POSTPROCESS, see Site, page and nav variables).

• assets: Assets for an asset pipeline. The only default handling of assets involves compiling SCSS/Sass files in the subdirectory scss. They will be compiled to CSS which is placed in the target directory htdocs/css. Other assets handling can be configured via settings in the configuration file, e.g. assets_commands and assets_fingerprinting. This will be described in more detail in Site, page and nav variables. Also take note of the fingerprint template filter, described in Template filters.

• static: Static files. Everything in here will be rsynced directly over to htdocs.