Other page formats

We have seen how to create pages from Markdown files in Lume. This is a convenient way for text-based sites like blogs or documentation. But you may want to create a complex page with small texts, images, videos, animations, etc. Every page has its own format.

Create pages with Nunjucks

Nunjucks, the format we have used to create layouts in the previous examples, can also be used to create pages directly. You only have to create a file with the .njk extension. For example:

---
title: Welcome to my page
layout: layout.njk
links:
  - text: My Twitter
    url: https://twitter.com/misteroom
  - text: My GitHub profile
    url: https://github.com/oscarotero
---

<article>
  <header>
    <h1>{{ title }}</h1>
  </header>

  <ul>
    {% for link in links %}
    <li>
      <a href="{{ link.url }}">
        {{ link.text }}
      </a>
    </li>
    {% endfor %}
  </ul>
</article>

This is an example of a page using Nunjucks. Like markdown, it can contain a front matter to store the page data, that is used to render the Nunjucks code. Note that it has the layout variable so the result of rendering this page will be passed to the layout in the content variable (along with the other variables title and links).

Create pages in JavaScript

JavaScript can be useful for complex pages requiring some logic before rendering. You have to create a file with the extension .tmpl.js. The .tmpl sub-extension is required to distinguish the JavaScript files to generate static pages from other JavaScript files destined to the executed in the browser ("tmpl" is for "template").

The previous Nunjucks example in JavaScript is:

export const title = "Welcome to my page";
export const layout = "layout.njk";
export const links = [
  {
    text: "My Twitter",
    url: "https://twitter.com/misteroom",
  },
  {
    text: "My GitHub profile",
    url: "https://github.com/oscarotero",
  },
];

export default function ({ title, links }) {
  return `
  <article>
    <header>
      <h1>${title}</h1>
    </header>

    <ul>
      ${
    links.map((link) => `<li><a href="${link.url}">${link.text}</a></li>`).join(
      "",
    )
  }
    </ul>
  </article>`;
}

As you can see, the variables exported in the front matter in the Nunjucks example are now exported as named ES modules.

The default export is a function that returns the page content. The first argument contains all available data for this page (not only the same variables exported by the page, but also other data provided by _data files).

More formats

Lume supports several formats to generate pages. Go to the Plugins section to see more info about all available formats. Some of them are installed by default (like Nunjucks, YAML, Modules etc) and others need to be installed in your _config.ts file (like Eta, JSX, Liquid or Pug).