Architecture

Architecture

This page provides an overview of the MarkBind's architecture.

MarkBind Architecture Diagram

The above diagram shows the key classes and in MarkBind. You may note the following from these:

Key classes

The 3 key classes representing different types of content are as follows:

  1. Page — a page, as specified by the user in their various site configuration glob or src properties. These are directly managed by the Site instance.
  2. Layout — a single layout file, as contained in the _markbind/layouts folder, collectively managed by LayoutManager.

Note that Layout instances do not generate any output files directly, but rather, they store intermediate processing results to be used in a Page.

  1. External — source files referenced in a Page, Layout or even another External that result in a output file. These output files are loaded dynamically and on-demand in the browser. These instances are managed by a single ExternalManager instance.

For example, the file referenced by a <panel src="xx.md"> generates a separate xx._include_.html, which is requested and loaded only when the panel is expanded.

Content processing flow

Every Page, Layout and External follows the same overall content processing flow, that is:

Nunjucks Markdown Html

Note that generation of Externals (e.g. <panel src="...">) do not fall within the content processing flow where they are referenced. These are only flagged for generation, and then processed by ExternalManager after, in another similar content processing flow within an External instance.

Rationale

This simple three stage flow provides a simple, predictable content processing flow for the user, and removes several other development concerns:

  1. As the templating language of choice, Nunjucks is always processed first, allowing its templating capabilities to be used to the full extent. Its syntax is also the most compatible and independent of the other stages.

  2. Secondly, Markdown is rendered before HTML, which produces more HTML. This also allows core Markdown features (e.g. code blocks) and Markdown plugins with eccentric syntaxes to be used without having to patch the HTML parser.

  3. Having processed possibly conflicting Nunjucks and Markdown syntax, HTML is then processed last.

Project Structure

Server Side Rendering