Lektor Shortcodes

The Lektor Shortcodes plugin allows you to use shortcodes (shortcodes are something like custom tags) in your fields (not templates), so your content doesn't have to have repetitive snippets over and over.

For example, my blog has some specific HTML that I add when I want an image with a border and caption to be displayed. The HTML looks like this:

    <div class="alignright">
        <a href="image-large.jpg">
            <img src="image.jpg" />
            <span class="caption">The caption</span>
        </a>
    </div>

Copy-pasting this every time gets tedious, and I have to search and replace it in all the content files every time I want to make a change. With the shortcodes plugin, this can be written as:

[% image align=right link="image-large.jpg" image=image.jpg caption="The caption" %]

Much easier, cleaner and less repetitive.

Installation

To install the plugin, just add lektor-shortcodes to your plugins from the command line:

lektor plugins add lektor-shortcodes

Usage

Using the plugin is simple. Just create a config file called shortcodes.ini in your configs directory and specify some shortcode templates. The templates are full Jinja templates, although (due to some limitations of ini files) they need to be on one line.

For instance, for the example above, the config file could be:

[global]
image = '<div class="align{{ align }}">{% if link %}<a href="{{ link }}"{% if not link.startswith("http") %} data-lightbox="gallery"{% endif %}>{% endif %}<img src="{{ image }}">{% if link %}</a>{% endif %}{% if caption %}<span class="caption">{{ caption }}</span>{% endif %}</div>'

This will allow you to use shortcodes with optional arguments, like so:

# An image with no caption or link:
[% image align=right image=hello.jpg %]


# An image with a link:
[% image align=right link=http://www.example.com image=hello.jpg %]

# Link and caption:
[% image align=right link=http://www.example.com image=hello.jpg caption="Hello!" %]

Shortcodes defined within the section named global will be processed automatically inside any of your site’s Markdown content. It is also possible to define shortcodes which are only expanded when the Jinja2 template for a page explicitly requests it. Shortcodes defined in any section not named global will only be applied when the template passed the content through a Jinja2 filter named shortcode. For example, if your HTML template references a field called body, and your config has a section called [special], you may request expanding shortcodes defined within the special section like so:

{{ body|shortcodes(section="special") }}

This will enable all shortcodes from the specified section, in addition to all globally defined shortcodes. If no section is specified, the filter defaults to the section named main (so it will include shortcodes in main unless you request a different section, and it will always include shortcodes in global no matter what).

Miscellanea

If you find a bug or have a feature request, please open an issue or file a PR. Thanks!