Plugins

Since version 3.0, Pelican manages plugins. Plugins are a way to add features to Pelican without having to directly hack Pelican code.

Pelican is shipped with a set of core plugins, but you can easily implement your own (and this page describes how).

How to use plugins

To load plugins, you have to specify them in your settings file. You have two ways to do so. Either by specifying strings with the path to the callables:

PLUGINS = ['pelican.plugins.gravatar',]

Or by importing them and adding them to the list:

from pelican.plugins import gravatar
PLUGINS = [gravatar, ]

If your plugins are not in an importable path, you can specify a PLUGIN_PATH in the settings:

PLUGIN_PATH = "plugins"
PLUGINS = ["list", "of", "plugins"]

How to create plugins

Plugins are based on the concept of signals. Pelican sends signals, and plugins subscribe to those signals. The list of signals are defined in a following section.

The only rule to follow for plugins is to define a register callable, in which you map the signals to your plugin logic. Let’s take a simple example:

from pelican import signals

def test(sender):
    print "%s initialized !!" % sender

def register():
    signals.initialized.connect(test)

List of signals

Here is the list of currently implemented signals:

Signal Arguments Description
initialized pelican object  
article_generate_context article_generator, metadata  
article_generator_init article_generator invoked in the ArticlesGenerator.__init__
pages_generate_context pages_generator, metadata  
pages_generator_init pages_generator invoked in the PagesGenerator.__init__

The list is currently small, don’t hesitate to add signals and make a pull request if you need them!

List of plugins

Not all the list are described here, but a few of them have been extracted from the Pelican core and provided in pelican.plugins. They are described here:

Tag cloud

Translation

GitHub activity

This plugin makes use of the feedparser library that you’ll need to install.

Set the GITHUB_ACTIVITY_FEED parameter to your GitHub activity feed. For example, my setting would look like:

GITHUB_ACTIVITY_FEED = 'https://github.com/kpanic.atom'

On the templates side, you just have to iterate over the github_activity variable, as in the example:

{% if GITHUB_ACTIVITY_FEED %}
   <div class="social">
           <h2>Github Activity</h2>
           <ul>

           {% for entry in github_activity %}
               <li><b>{{ entry[0] }}</b><br /> {{ entry[1] }}</li>
           {% endfor %}
           </ul>
   </div><!-- /.github_activity -->
{% endif %}

github_activity is a list of lists. The first element is the title and the second element is the raw HTML from GitHub.

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