Kramdown and Webby

A number of the sites that I manage for fun are simply static web pages. The dynamic nature is handled by javascript classes and plugins. This means that I really don’t need or want an application server to serve these sites, but I do want to still use some of the practices that I apply to web application development. Enter webby - it works by combining the contents of a page with a layout to produce HTML. Awesomely simple and powerful. It can use the rdiscount gem to process files in markdown format into html pages, but I prefer to use the kramdown library. No problem, here is how you can add kramdown support to your webby project.

if try_require('kramdown', 'kramdown')
  Webby::Filters.register :kramdown do |input|
    Kramdown::Document.new(input, :parse_block_html => true).to_html
  end
else
  Webby::Filters.register :kramdown do |input|
    raise Webby::Error, "'kramdown' must be installed to use the kramdown filter"
  end
end

Simply paste the above into a file called kramdown.rb in your project’s lib directory and then you can specify filter: kramdown in your webby templates.