Jinja Filters

Jinja Filters is a plugin for Pelican, a static site generator written in Python.

Jinja Filters provides a selection of functions (called filters) for templates to use when building your website. They are packaged for Pelican, but may prove useful for other projects that make use of Jinja2.

Installation

The easiest way to install Jinja Filters is through the use of Pip. This will also install the required dependencies (currently pelican and titlecase) automatically.

pip install pelican-jinja-filters

As Jinja Filters is a namespace plugin, assuming you are using Pelican 4.5 (or newer) and only other namespace plugins, Jinja Filters will be automatically be loaded by Pelican. And that's it!

If you are using an older version of Pelican, or non-namespace plugins, you may need to add Jinja Filters to your pelicanconf.py:

PLUGINS = [
    # others...
    "pelican.plugins.jinja_filters",
]

The filters are now available for use in your templates.

Jinja Filters supports Pelican from version 3 on.

Usage

At present, the plugin includes the following filters:

• datetime – allows you to change to format displayed for a datetime object. Optionally supply a datetime format string to get a custom format.
• article_date – a specialized version of datetime that returns datetimes as wanted for article dates; specifically Friday, November 4, 2020.
• breaking_spaces – replaces non-breaking spaces (HTML code  ) with normal spaces.
• titlecase – Titlecases the supplied string.
• datetime_from_period – take the period provided on period archive pages, and turn it into a proper datetime.datetime object (likely to feed to another filter)
• merge_date_url – given a datetime (on the left) and a supplied URL, "apply" the date to it. Envisioned in particular for YEAR_ARCHIVE_URL, MONTH_ARCHIVE_URL, and DAY_ARCHIVE_URL.

For example, within your theme templates, you might have code like:

<span class="published">
    Article Published {{ article.date | article_date }}
</span>

gives:

Article Published Friday, November 4, 2020

Or with your own date format:

<span class="published">
    Article Published {{ article.date | datetime('%b %d, %Y') }}
</span>

gives:

Article Published Nov 04, 2020

Filters can also be chained, or applied in sequence. For example to remove breaking spaces and then titlecase a category name, you might have code like:

<a href="{{ SITEURL -}} / {{- article.category.url }}">
    {{ article.category | breaking_spaces | titlecase }}
</a>

On a Monthly Archive page, you might have the following to link "up" to the Yearly Archive page:

<a href="{{ SITEURL -}} /
         {{- period | datetime_from_period | merge_date_url(YEAR_ARCHIVE_URL) }}">
    {{ period | datetime_from_period | datetime('%Y') }}
</a>

which might give:

<a href="https://blog.minchin.ca/posts/2017/>2017</a>

Contributing

Contributions are most welcome! See Contributing for more details.

To set up a development environment:

1. Fork the project on GitHub, and then clone your fork.
2. Set up and activate a virtual environment.
3. Have invoke on your system path or install it into your virtual environment.
4. Run invoke setup.

For more details, see Contributing.

License

Jinja Filters is under the MIT License. See attached License.txt for full license text.