Collection from JSON?

[metalsmith]

Collection from JSON?

[poshaughnessy]

Took a quick look and it seems like this would be more of a change to Metalsmith itself? If it's OK, I'll just leave this issue open for a bit in case anyone has any suggestions though, thanks.

[renatorib]

👍
I need this feature too. :D

[fidian]

I'm the author of metalsmith-data-loader and it should be able to load JSON for you. Assuming the default configuration and if you have something that can parse mustache templates ...

---
data: content/talks.json
---
<ul>
    {{#data}}
    <li><a href="{{href}}">{{title}}</a></li>
    {{/data}}
</ul>

The above would work with a JSON file like this:

[
    {
        "href": "/page1.html",
        "title": "This is page 1"
    }
]

Would this solve your data loading needs?

[poshaughnessy]

Thanks @fidian, yes that's what I was looking for!

I actually realised afterwards I was over-complicating it and I should just write a markdown list page directly. But your plugin seems like the solution if I wanted to do that again - I just tried it out and I think I got it working fine. In case it helps others, I set it up like this:

// build.js

Metalsmith(__dirname)
    .use(dataLoader())
    // ... Various other config here ...
    .use(templates('handlebars'))    // NB. I'm using metalsmith-templates but I see it's now deprecated
    // ... Various other config here ...

// src/talks.md

---
title: Talks
data: content/talks.json
template: talks.hbs
---
# Talks

// src/content/talks.json

[
  {
    "href": "http://foo.com",
    "title": "Lorem Ipsum Talk"
  },
  {
    "href": "http://bar.com",
    "title": "Another Great Talk."
  }
]

// templates/talks.hbs

<ul>
  {{#data}}
  <li><a href="{{href}}">{{title}}</a></li>
  {{/data}}
</ul>

This produces:

// build/talks/index.html

<ul>
  <li><a href="http://foo.com">Lorem Ipsum Talk</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://bar.com">Another Great Talk.</a></li>
</ul>

Thanks again. I'm going to close this issue now.