Creating a new DecentCMS content item

Currently, DecentCMS stores content items in the file system, which is just fine for small sites, and makes editing and deploying them quite easy, even though there is no admin dashboard yet. Creating a content item is done by simply creating a file in one of the supported formats: JSON, YAML, and Snippable YAML + Markdown.

The relative path to the file under the site’s “content” directory defines its id, and its URL. For example,  the file `/sites/default/content/foo/bar/baz.yaml.md` is available under the `/foo/bar/baz` URL, and that is also its id.

A page will typically have a title and a Markdown body (other flavors of text are available if you must). The content type can be specified under the `meta.type` property. If it’s not specified, it defaults to “page”. A simple page can thus be defined with the following `filename.yaml.md`:

title: Foo Bar Baz

-8<------------------

Some *Markdown* text.

If we wanted to explicitly specify the content type, that becomes:

title: Foo Bar Baz
meta:
  type: page

-8<------------------

Some *Markdown* text.

It is also possible to use a standard YAML file instead of a Snippable file:

title: Foo Bar Baz
body:
  Some *Markdown* text.

It can be convenient for larger bodies of text to isolate the body of the page to a separate file. This way, there is a metadata file, and a Markdown file:

-- baz.yaml --

title: Foo Bar Baz
body:
  src: baz.md

-- baz.md --

Some *Markdown* text.

In this case, the body part, instead of being a simple string, is a pointer to the Markdown file.

The same thing can be expressed in JSON:

{
  "title": "Foo Bar Baz",
  "body": {
    "src": "baz.md"
  }
}

There are plenty of options to define content item files in DecentCMS, and if that’s not enough, there are extensibility points at every level. In the next post, I’ll show how content types are defined.