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Content Managers

Content Managers are a way to control how and where your content is stored.

Introduction

Render Engine Collection uses a ContentManager to manage the storage of content for site generation. By default content is stored in the file system with each piece of content existing in a discrete file. With an alternate ContentManager the content can be stored in a database, JSON file, or other alternate data store.

Selecting a ContentManager

The ContentManager for a given [Collection] is controlled by the ContentManager attribute. When the class is instantiated the ContentManager is also instantiated with any content_manager_extras being passed as arguments. To access the ContentManager of a given Collection use the content_manager attribute.

Creating a ContentManager

To create a ContentManager create a sub-class of ContentManager that implements the following methods:

@property
@abstractmethod
def pages(self) -> Iterable:
    """The Page objects managed by the content manager"""
    ...

@abstractmethod
def create_entry(self, filepath: Path = None, editor: str = None, metadata: dict = None, content: str = None):
    """Create a new entry"""
    ...

pages

The pages property is how the Collection accesses its content. It is a method that must be implemented by every ContentManager. An example pages implementation (from the FileContentManger) is:

@property
def pages(self) -> Iterable:
    if self._pages is None:
        self._pages = [self.collection.get_page(page) for page in self.iter_content_path()]
    yield from self._pages

create_entry

The create_entry method is used by the Render Engine CLI tool to add new entries. It is responsible for adding the new entry to the datastore and, if an editor is specified, giving the user the ability to edit the new entry prior to committing the entry to the datastore.

Arguments

  • filepath: Path: The path on the filesystem to store the new entry.
  • editor: str: The text editor to open for editing the new entry.
  • content: str: The initial content for the new entry.
  • metadata: dict: The metadata for the new entry.

Note

Not every ContentManager actually needs all the arguments that are passed.

find_entry

The find_entry method is used to find a specific page in a Collection. It will search through all the pages known to the ContentManager until it finds one that has all the attributes specified. Even if multiple entries would satisfy the criteria, only the first found will be returned.

update_entry

The update_entry is used to update an existing entry in a ContentManager.

Parameters:

page: Page  # The Page to update
content: str = None  # Updated content
**kwargs: dict  # The other attributes for the updated page