Nanoc and Multiple Layout Templates

A while back we took a quick look at nanoc for generating static web sites. I've been using it a bit both experimenting and for a simple web site for an author friend of mine. I'm going to do a few short articles on using it, documenting what I've learned in much the same way I've tried to do with Ramaze.

Let's start with some simple code that uses multiple layout templates. You have this often with web sites where there's a home page that uses a different layout than the rest of the pages of the site. Let's start with creating a new site. We do that the same way we did last time with ...

nanoc create_site multiple_templates

and let's add a couple of pages to go along with them ...

nanoc create_item page1
nanoc create_item page2

We didn't really talk about the Rules in the last post and I'm only going to touch on them now. You should take a few minutes and read a bit about them here. We'll discuss them a bit more as we go through future posts.

Now, we need to modify the Rules file to tell it to use an alternate layout for the content/page[12].html files. I'm not going to show the entire file, just the compile rule for these ...

compile '/page*/' do
  filter :erb
  layout 'page'
end

What this rule says is that when we "compile" files in our content/ directory, we should first run them through the erb (embedded ruby) and then use the page template in the layouts directory.

Here's the default which will get use by everything else (essentially our main page at content/index.html).

compile '*' do
  filter :erb
  layout 'default'
end

This along with the code for all of this up on github should be enough to get you started. As always though, let me know if you have questions or comments.