html.plated.files

A special string in the filename triggers chunk file processing, by default this is ^. but it can be changed to another character or string when plated is invoked. ^. seems to be a reasonably safe yet generally unused sequence of characters in file names.

Chunk files are text files containing chunks of text assigned to symbolic chunknames, these chunks can then be referenced by tags contained in other chunks and expanded to build final output files.

This is intended to be simple macro expansion only rather than a complex programming language. Any programming would take place in a plugin, for instance we include a blog plugin that helps build blog style websites on top of this base chunk system.

There are two basic types of chunk files, directory scope and file scope. Directory scope chunk files contain chunks that can be referenced by any other chunk file in their directory as well as any sub directories. Directory scope chunks declared inside a sub directory will replace any chunks defined higher up the path, this allows us to adjust and group data using hierarchical directories.

^.html
^.css
^.md
^.what.ever.you.like

Are all examples of directory scoped chunk files, they do not create any output files themselves but are parsed to provide directory scope chunks which can be used in other chunk files. It does not matter what extension is used, primarily it is intended to be used as a clue to editors to provide appropriate language highlighting. By convention css chunks would be placed inside ^.css and html chunks inside ^.html but this is in no way enforced or necessary for plated to work.

index.^.html
layout.^.css
hacks.^.js

Are all examples of file scoped chunk files. Each one will create a file in the output directory with the same path but the name altered slightly to remove ^. from it. For example index.^.html becomes index.html

The extension used selects the chunk name that will be rendered into the output file. So index.^.html will render the html chunk into the output file and layout.^.css will render the css chunk.

Usually pages in a directory will share the same layout, so a html chunk will be declared at the directory level with the file just adding a content chunk to be rendered inside this page structure. The cascading chunk system means you are free to alter this in sub directories but often pages have a lot in common so keeping a bunch of generic layout chunks in the root with sub directories just picking from them works perfectly. The idea is to provide data organisational tools but not to dictate the use.