VoodooPad Pro Blogging

It’s time to package up all my VoodooPad Pro blogging scripts and assorted web export plugins so that I can

1. Remember what the heck I was thinking.
2. Remember what all these pieces were supposed to accomplish as a whole.
3. Provide some sort of reference to others interested in this stuff.

Concept: To use VoodooPad Pro as a CMS for a web site, allowing for static sites and inclusion of blog-style concatenated page. The blog-style page was originally intended as a “News” page of a static business site. SEO optimization necessitating the addition of a page with re-newing content. Google likes it more.

Disclaimer: I like Markdown and built these scripts around the fact that the VPP document is essentially always formatted in plain text. Images need to be added using links.

I will include a sample package that contains a VPP document, a web export plugin and several script plugins. The site the sample is based upon is at http://losrobleshoa.org.

VoodooPad Pro is a requirement as the meta data and triggers are necessary in the creation of the files. My workflow is as follows.

1. Create new page/post.
2. Run script plugin Blog > Meta Markup - HomepageMeta on new page.
3. Run script plugin Blog > Make Homepage and Feed
4. Run web export.
5. FTP files up to site. I use Transmit. It’s also a great app.

The script will move all the created files into a folder structure so that the file structure on the computer will match the web site structure.

VoodooPad Pro document Item meta data is contained in the HomepageMeta page of the document. This is where most of the personalized info on the site is contained.

In the VPP document tags are used to create a pseudo-folder structure. This means that a page may only have one tag. Some pages are not exported but are used as reference, ie. links in the sidebar or the HomepageMeta page. Static pages that are to be rendered at the root level of the site are tagged main.

Triggers can be used to include certain information into specific pages or info on every page. I use this for things like Google Analytics which needs to be on every page or the analytics confirmation that is only on the index.html page.

The Web Export Plugin Some customization of these files will be necessary for your specific site.

• preflight.sh - creates the actual folder hierarchy, the folders are created in the preflight.sh script. The preflight.sh script also copies files like images to the export folder. These images are kept in the web export plugin. File like robots.txt that need to be at the root level are kept in a root folder inside the web export plugin.

• postflight.sh - can be used to rename pages that may be PHP based from .html to .php

• deleteVPExtra.sh - deletes the extra pages that VoodooPad creates during a web export. No changes to this file are needed.

• fixRelativePaths.sh - fixes the relative URLs that occur inside of nested pages. No changes to this file are needed.

• parseMetaXml.rb - Parses the meta.xml file that VoodooPad creates and uses that infomation to move files into their correct folder structure on the disk and to create a valid sitemap.xml file for use with Google Sitemaps.

• Info.plist - This file was edited to call these scripts during the web export process.

Script Plugins These are placed in the ~/Library/Application Support/VoodooPad/Script PlugIns/ folder. No changes should be required in these scripts. They will be viewable from the Plugin > Blog menu in VoodooPad.

• meta_markup_HomepageMeta.lua - Takes the data from the page HomepageMeta in the VPP doc and adds specific item meta data to the frontmost page.

• meta_markup_update.lua - Propagates changes made to the HomepageMeta page to all the item meta data of all pages that require them. This is only just the pages used for the blog-style page.

• blog_home_atom.lua - Creates the blog-style page now called home in the VPP document and also creates a valid atom.xml feed in the output directory.

Comments and questions are welcome. If some enterprising person wants to wrap this all up in the new plugin architecture that would be cool. I’m happy to help if I can.

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