cleaver.json

[jdan]

A modest proposal

I'd like to start a conversation about this.

Currently, cleaver presentations contain metadata:

title: My presentation
author:
    name: Jordan Scales
    twitter: @jdan
output: talk.html
style: something.css

--

# My presentation
## It has a subtitle

This is, in my opinion, a little weird. I would like to separate documents into two parts: the actual presentation (just markdown) and a new file called cleaver.json, which may look like this:

{
  "title": "My presentation",
  "style": "something.css",
  "author": {
    "name": "Jordan Scales",
    "url": "http://jscal.es",
    "twitter": "@jdan"
  },
  "output": "talk.html"
}

I'd also like to reopen the possibility of handling command-line options (we used to do this)

cleaver presentation.md --style=something.css --output=talk.html

so you could avoid creating a cleaver.json.

Benefits

Separation of presentation content and settings. I feel like having the content and settings tightly coupled is a little counterintuitive. We could keep things more organized, which could open the door to a few new features - plugins, middleware, that sort of thing.

Downsides

No longer one file :(. The whole idea is that cleaver presentations are super portable, both when they're being creating and when they're rendered. You can still have your entire presentation contained in a single file, though, and simply use command-line options to achieve what you can now.

What are your thoughts?

[Bartvds]

Definitely +1

The values merge with those in the markdown. And with the option to specify the path to a config file.

Maybe even some logic to get the default title from the first level 1 header? This way we can externalise everything not specific to the presentation.

Of course I assume a config object can be passed to the node.js api?

[lufengd3]

@jdan Yes, I'm truly feel unconvienent recently, the first thing I do is copy the conf metadata from README and paste when I open a markdown file. I agree with your proposal, but don't you think that makes the command-line too long with those options when user start a new markdown file. What's more, how do you handle the cleaver.json which each markdown file has one? It makes things a little complex in my mind.

---

My proposal:

• add a _cleaver init _ option.

cleaver init filename.md

With this option, when you start a new file, add the conf metadata at new file's begining. If the file alearedy exists, just append the conf metadata at the begining.

[jdan]

Good idea @keith3, there's some work being done in #70 for that

[sudodoki]

If you use cleaver.json it would mean you cannot have all your presentation in single folder, but rather have each wrapped in folder with .md & .json file in it. Not sure it's a frequent use-case, but it's thing worth mentioning.

[jdan]

Yeah, not a fan of this after thinking about it more. Thanks for chiming in.