Contentful Middleman

Contentful Middleman is a Middleman extension to use the Middleman static site generator together with the API-driven Contentful CMS. It is powered by the Contentful Ruby Gem.

Experience the power of Middleman while staying sane as a developer by letting end-users edit content in a web-based interface.

Installation

Add the following line to the Gemfile of your Middleman project:

gem "contentful_middleman"

Then as usual, run:

bundle install

Usage

Run middleman contentful in your terminal. This will fetch entries for the configured spaces and content types and put the resulting data in the local data folder as yaml files.

--rebuild option

The contentful command has a --rebuild option which will trigger a rebuild of your site only if there were changes between the last and the current import.

Configuration

To configure the extension, add the following configuration block to Middleman's config.rb:

activate :contentful do |f|
  f.space         = SPACE
  f.access_token  = ACCESS_TOKEN
  f.cda_query     = QUERY
  f.content_types = CONTENT_TYPES_MAPPINGS
end

Parameter	Description
space	Hash with an user choosen name for the space as key and the space id as value
access_token	Contentful Delivery API access token
cda_query	Hash describing query configuration. See contentful.rb for more info
content_types	Hash describing the mapping applied to entries of the imported content types

You can activate the extension multiple times to import entries from different spaces.

Entry mapping

The extension will transform every fetched entry before storing it as a yaml file in the local data folder. If a custom mapper is not specified a default one will be used.

The default mapper will map fields, assets and linked entries.

Custom mappers

You can create your own mappers if you need so. The only requirement for a class to behave as a mapper is to have a map(context, entry) instance method. This method will take as parameters:

• A context object. All properties set on this object will be written to the yaml file
• An entry

Following is an example of such custom mapper:

class MyAwesomeMapper
  def map(context, entry)
    context.slug = entry.title.parameterize
    #... more transformations
  end
end

If you don't want to map all the fields by hand inherit from the Base mappper:

class MyAwesomeMapper < ContentfulMiddleman::Mappers::Base
  def map(context, entry)
    super
    # After calling super the context object
    # will have a property for every field in the
    # entry
  end
end

Configuration: examples

activate :contentful do |f|
  f.space         = {partners: 'space-id'}
  f.access_token  = 'some_access_token'
  f.cda_query     = { content_type: 'content-type-id', include: 1 }
  f.content_types = { partner: 'content-type-id'}
end

The above configuration does the following:

• Sets the alias partners to the space with id some-id
• Sets the alias partner to the content type with id content-type-id
• Uses the default mapper to transform partner entries into yaml files (no mapper specified for the partner content type)

Entries fetched using this configuration will be stored as yaml files in data/partners/partner/ENTRY_ID.yaml.

class Mapper
  def map(context, entry)
    context.title = "#{entry.title}-title"
    #...
  end
end

activate :contentful do |f|
  f.space         = {partners: 'space-id'}
  f.access_token  = 'some_access_token'
  f.cda_query     = { content_type: '1EVL9Bl48Euu28QEOa44ai', include: 1 }
  f.content_types = { partner: {mapper: Mapper, id: 'content-type-id'}}
end

The above configuration is the same as the previous one only that this time we are setting a custom mapper for the entries belonging to the partner content type.

Using imported entries in templates

Middleman will load all the yaml files stored in the local data folder. This lets you use all the imported data into your templates.

Consider that we have data stored under data/partners/partner. Then in our templates we could use that data like this:

<h1>Partners</h1>
<ol>
  <% data.partners.partner.each do |id, partner| %>
    <li><%= partner["name"] %></li>
  <% end %>
</ol>

Rendering Markdown:

If you want to use markdown in your content types you manually have to render this to markdown. Depending on the markdown library you need to transform the data. For Kramdown this would be:

<%= Kramdown::Document.new(data).to_html %>