Blazon

Blazon is a data-driven, plugin-powered, multi-target content publishing framework.

Use-cases:

• Documentation, guides, manuals
• Contracts (with variables)
• Legal documents
• "Conditional text" content
• Wiki content rendering
• Marketing sites
• Policies, Procedures, Forms
• Knowledge graphs
• Digital gardens
• Code repository project documentation
• Complex data graph visualization (i.e. organizational structures)

Definitions:

• Publication: Collection of "documents"
• Document: unique identifier (path), and a controller for rendering output
• Plugin: allows to modify every phase of the loading and publishing process
• Target: one of many outputs, produced by a Publisher (i.e. static html, pdf, etc).

Features:

• Load content from local or remote sources
• Markdown, with frontmatter
• Xillion Resources
• Twig templating
• Supports both static site generation and dynamic rendering

Examples

• https://github.com/linkorb/starwars-blazon graphql + twig example site

Installation

git clone [email protected]:linkorb/blazon.git
cd blazon
composer install # install php dependencies into blazon's vendor/ directory
./bin/blazon -v # get version and help output

Usage

Your Blazon project (i.e. your site, book, report, etc) should be stored in it's own directory, preferably a Git repository.

From there, use the blazon cli tool to generate a static HTML site into the build/ directory of your project:

Publishing

cd path/to/my/blazon-project
path/to/blazon publish -vvv

This command:

1. Builds your Publication in-memory, using your custom PublicationFactory, or the default factory.
2. Loops over all registered Document instances
3. Renders the output of each Document using it's handler callback, and writes it to the Document's path into build/
4. Recursively copies any public assets (images, css, js, pdfs, etc) from public/ into build/

You can now serve the generated build/ directory as a static (html) site on your favorite service:

• A simple nginx container
• Github pages
• Netlify
• ...etc

Auto-Publishing with "watch-mode"

Pass the -w flag to the blazon publish command to tell blazon to keep watching your project's source directory for changes. After any detected change, it will automatically (re)publish to build/

Preview server

Blazon includes a minimal preview server that you can use while authoring content and styling your publication.

Simply point your favorite PHP-enabled webserver (i.e. apache with mod-php, nginx with php-fpm, etc) to blazon's public/ directory.

Make sure to setup SOURCE_PATH=/path/to/your/blazon-project in Blazon's .env file.

Features:

• Builds the publication on every HTTP request
• In-memory, no writes to build/
• Verbose error messages when setting DEBUG=true in your .env file.
• Supports serving static assets from your publication's public/ directory.

It is not recommended to use the preview server in production. Use the blazon publish command instead for maximum security and performance.

Inspiration

• Gatsby
• Hugo
• Sage
• Xillion
• Schemata

License

MIT. Please refer to the license file for details.

Brought to you by the LinkORB Engineering team

Check out our other projects at linkorb.com/engineering.

Btw, we're hiring!