Handling drafts

[TechWatching]

How do you handle drafts on statiq.web ?

What I would need as someone writing articles on my blog is:

• Have a way (metadata for instance) to distinguish draft articles from other
• Be able to preview my draft articles when I am working on an article not yet finished (so while debugging locally)
• Prevent draft articles to be publicly available when I deploy me blog on Netlify

Is there something built-in to do that ?

I think that some static generators use a property to mark some of their posts as "draft" and then you can use their CLI to display or not drafts.

I have seem that on your personal blog @daveaglick you use a draft folder but I don't really understand if it's just to store some draft articles that you can't preview or if there is a mechanism that allow you to preview them locally but prevent them from being published when you deploy you static site.

[daveaglick]

This is a great question! Folks have come up with a few way of doing this. The most common (probably because it was supported back in Wyam) is to set Published to a future date:

Published: 1/1/9999

That will cause the post to be excluded from the build and then you can clear or set the Published value when you're ready to post.

Another approach is to set Excluded which is new to Statiq Web. By default, Excluded looks at Published to determine if the document should be excluded. But you can configure it to something else. For example, if you want Excluded to look for a Draft front matter value instead you can set the following in a _directory.yaml file:

Excluded: => Draft

Alternatively, you could exclude everything in an entire folder by adding a _directory.yaml file just to that folder:

Excluded: true

You could even get really fancy and toggle exclusion based on some other condition like a setting when working locally or not:

Excluded: => GetBool("SomeKey") && GetDateTime("Published") > DateTime.Today.AddDays(1)