Projects

Unlike monolithic static site generators such as Gatsby or Hugo, Metalsmith offers a clear and simple understanding of its functionality. With its plugin architecture, even complex plugins can be easily created, and there is a vast selection of plugins available to choose from.

Metalsmith, originally developed by Segment in early 2014, experienced a period of inactivity after a few years of initial development.

Recently, a new lead developer/maintainer Kevin Van Lierde AKA webketje has taken over and Metalsmith is now again under active development. Read more about this history here.

Over the years, I've created several plugins that I've made available to the community. I also frequently contribute to existing plugins. All my plugins and starters are available on GitHub and NPM. Here are a few of my projects:

Metalsmith Optimize HTML: Build with lots of inspiration from htmlcompressor. This plugin optimizes HTML files by removing unnecessary whitespace, comments, and attributes. It also normalizes URLs, boolean attributes, and data attributes.

Metalsmith MDN: This plugin lets you use Nunjucks in your markdown content. It enables the re-use of section components, the same components that you use in your page section templates can now be used in long text pages. Simply add the component props to the frontmatter of your markdown file and use the mdn tag to include the component in your markdown content.

Metalsmith Markdown Partials: This plugin facilitates the reuse of markdown partials, by replacing include markers in a markdown file's content. The key advantage is that it promotes modular markdown and the reuse of content.

Metalsmith Blog Lists: This tool adds metadata lists, such as 'All Blogs', 'Recent Blogs', 'Featured Blogs', and an 'Annualized Blogs List', which can be accessed by all pages. These lists are useful for creating widgets to promote featured or latest blog posts. Please note that this plugin requires all blog posts to be located in the 'blog/' directory of the content.

Metalsmith Safe Links: This plugin optimizes links by stripping the protocol and hostname from local links, and adding a target and rel attribute to external links. Given that markdown syntax only permits alt and title attributes in links, this plugin eliminates the need for HTML to add other attributes in a markdown document.

Metalsmith Prism: A plugin initially authored by Robert McGuinness and sponsored by Availity, Metalsmith Prism enables syntax highlighting for Metalsmith HTML templates using Prism.js. I took over the maintenance of this plugin in March 2022.

Metalsmith Static Files: Designed to copy a directory from the source folder to the build folder, this plugin was created as an up-to-date alternative to the now deprecated and archived metalsmith-assets.

Here are some starters that may be helpful to get started with building a Metalsmith site.

Metalsmith Bare-bones Starter: As the name says, this starter is providing a bare-bones setup to get you started. It uses Markdown content and Nunjucks templating and has a couple of pages. The rest is up to you.

Metalsmith Blog Starter: A blog starter, based on the Metalsmith Bare-bones Starter. It adds a blog landing page and several "greek" blog posts. The rest is up to you.

Metalsmith Company Starter: Company websites are normally more complex than your average portfolio or blog site. Here is a starter that inlcudes flexible page layouts, a responsive/progressive image component and more.