Pelican 3.1 released

Easier intra-site linking

Whether linking from one post to another or including locally-hosted images on a page, linking to intra-site resources has been significantly enhanced. In addition to improving reliability, it's now possible to link to a resource in your source content hierarchy instead of the generated hierarchy.

Find more information here: http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.1.1/getting_started.html#linking-to-internal-content

Metadata extraction from filename

There is a new FILENAME_METADATA setting that adds support for metadata extraction from the filename via regular expressions. For example, if you would like to extract both the date and the post slug from the filename, you could set your FILENAME_METADATA setting to something like: '(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'

Web asset processing moved to separate plugin

We are trying to move non-essential features out of the Pelican core and instead make them available as plugins. Web asset management is an example of this effort — we don't think this is a core component of Pelican, but it's still a useful feature and remains available to those who want to use it.

New gzip cache plugin

The gzip cache plugin allows generated text files to be compressed once during site generation and thus served without needing any server-side compression. This obviates the need for the web server to compress these text files on-the-fly, which can result in lower web server CPU utilization.

Basic functional tests restored

We now have a way to fully test Pelican's output, which helps us understand whether code changes break Pelican's intended behavior (for developers and for end users) while we are developing new features.

Template pages

If you want to generate custom pages besides your blog entries, you can use any Jinja template file with a path pointing to the file and the destination path for the generated file. For instance, if you have a blog with three static pages — a list of books, your resume, and a contact page — you could set them up via:

TEMPLATE_PAGES = {'src/books.html': 'dest/books.html',
                  'src/resume.html': 'dest/resume.html',
                  'src/contact.html': 'dest/contact.html'}

Feed improvements

The FEED_ALL_ATOM and FEED_ALL_RSS directives have been introduced as distinct from their FEED_ATOM and FEED_RSS brethren. The former show entries in all available language translations, while the latter only include entries written in the site's primary language.

Use folders as category

Until now, Pelican made the assumption that the folders used to organize your content should be used as the respective categories of the articles contained within. You now can configure this behavior via the USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY setting.

New signals

Plugins now have additional signals at their disposal:

• We now provide a generator_init signal that is sent when the generator is initialized. You'll receive the generator as an argument.
• get_generators is invoked in Pelican.get_generator_classes and can return a Generator or several generators in a tuple or list. This is useful when you want to add your own generators.
• article_generate_preread is invoked before an article is read in ArticlesGenerator.generate_context. Use this if the code needs to do something before every article is parsed.

Minor enhancements and fixes

• Empty value for the AUTHOR setting is now allowed
• Improved WordPress importing
• Generated content doesn't contain as much blank lines as it did previously
• New icon for Google+ and improvements to many others
• Many small documentation and bug fixes not described here

On the horizon

• We are working on moving plugins out of the main Pelican repository and into a separate repository.
• We would like to implement measures designed to speed up site generation in order to reduce processing time.
• In order to provide more regular updates on development progress, we intend to publish blog posts on a more frequent basis.

That's all for now. More to come soon! :-)