WordPress Plugin - Publish Documents from Git
This WordPress Plugin lets you easily publish, collaborate on and version control your [Markdown, Jupyter notebook] documents directly from your favorite remote Git platform, even if it's self-hosted.
The advantages are:
- Write documents in your favorite editor and just push to your remote repository to update your blog instantly
- Use the power of version control: publish different versions of the document in different posts, i.e. from another branch or commit than latest
master
- Easy to update by your readers via pull requests, minimizing the chance of stale tutorials
The following document types are currently supported:
- Markdown
- Jupyter notebooks (only for public repositories)
The following platforms are currently supported:
Usage
Note, this plugin uses Github's wonderful /markdown API to render to HTML. This comes with 2 caveats:
- Unless authenticated, the rate limit is set at 60 requests per minute. Since v1.1.0 the plugin is capable of statically caching content. In case that's not dynamic enough for you, your only option currently is to not use any cache in which case every document will be pulled from your provider every time someone opens it on your site. Then it's strongly recommended to create a Github access token and register it with the plugin. Then the rate limit will be set to 5000 requests per hour. See Global attributes section for details on how to do that.
- The Markdown content cannot exceed 400 KB, so roughly 400 000 characters incl whitespace. If not a monographic dissertation, this should not be an applicable limit though.
Configuration
In the main menu Settings ► Documents from Git you can set all important global settings.
Note, previous versions used to include a config.json. This is deprecated now due to security concerns.
Shortcodes
The plugin features a variety of shortcodes.
Publish documents
The document-specific shortcodes follow a pattern of [git-<platform>-<action>], where
<platform> can be one of
github: if you use Github as your VCS platformbitbucket: if you use Bitbucket as your VCS platformgitlab: if you use Gitlab as your VCS platform
<action> can be one of
markdown: Render your Markdown files hosted on your VCS platform in Github's rendering stylejupyter: Render your Jupyter notebook hosted on your VCS platfrom (only for public repositories)checkout: Renders a small badge-like box with a link to the document and the date of the last commithistory: Renders a <h2> section with the last commit dates, messages and authors
Manipulate rendering style
Additionally, there's an enclosing shortcode [git-add-css] which adds a <div id="git-add-css" class="<classes_attribute>" to wrap its contents. That way you can manipulate the style freely with additional CSS classes. Follow these steps:
- Add a CSS file to your theme's root folder, which contains some classes, e.g.
class1, class2, class3
- Enqueue the CSS file by adding
wp_enqueue_style('my-style', get_template_directory_uri().'/my-style.css'); to the theme's functions.php
- Add the enclosing
git-add-css shortcode to your post with the custom CSS classes in the classes attribute, e.g.:
[git-add-css classes="class1 class2 class3"]
[git-gitlab-checkout url=...]
[git-gitlab-markdown url=...]
[git-gitlab-history url=...]
[/git-add-css]
Attributes
Each shortcode takes a few attributes, indicating if it's required for public or private repositories:
| Attribute | Action | Public repo | Private repo | Type | Description |
|---|
url | all except git-add-css | :ballot_box_with_check: | :ballot_box_with_check: | string | The browser URL of the document, e.g. https://github.com/gis-ops/wordpress-markdown-git/blob/master/README.md |
user | all except git-add-css | :negative_squared_cross_mark: | :ballot_box_with_check: | string | The user name (not email) of an authorized user |
token | all except git-add-css | :negative_squared_cross_mark: | :ballot_box_with_check: | string | The access token/app password for the authorized user |
cache_ttl | all except git-add-css | :negative_squared_cross_mark: | :negative_squared_cross_mark: | integer | The time in seconds that the plugin will cache, only for cache_strategy=static. |
cache_strategy | all except git-add-css | :negative_squared_cross_mark: | :negative_squared_cross_mark: | integer | Only static caching is implemented so far. dynamic caching is on the way! |
limit | history | :negative_squared_cross_mark: | :negative_squared_cross_mark: | integer | Limits the history of commits to this number. Default 5. |
classes | git-add-css | :ballot_box_with_check: | :ballot_box_with_check: | string | The additional CSS classes to render the content with |
Caching
Often we need to prioritize speed when loading content and, in addition, it is very costly to fetch, load and format the content every time we need to read the content of the post.
This plugin soon offers 2 methods for caching, static and dynamic which can be set via the cache_strategy property.
Static caching (cache_strategy=static)
This is the default strategy, as it doesn't require any user action.
The property cache_ttl sets how many seconds the content cache will keep alive.
Currently there's no way to flush the cache manually. However, changing cache_ttl or the history limit will create a new cache.
Dynamic caching (cache_strategy=dynamic)
This is not implemented yet. See #20 for details.
Token authorization
You need to authorize via user and token if you intend to publish from a private repository. You don't need to authorize if the repository is open.
However, keep in mind that some platforms have stricter API limits for anonymous requests which are greatly extended if you provide your credentials. So even for public repos it could make sense. And unless you use this plugin's caching capabilities, it's strongly recommended to register a Github access token regardless of the VCS hosting platform, see the beginning of the chapter.
How to generate the token depends on your platform:
This plugin needs only Read access to your repositories. Keep that in mind when creating an access token.
Examples
We publish our own tutorials with this plugin: https://gis-ops.com/tutorials/.
Publish Markdown from Github
[git-github-markdown url="https://github.com/gis-ops/tutorials/blob/master/qgis/QGIS_SimplePlugin.md"]
Publish Markdown from Github with 1 hour cache
[git-github-markdown url="https://github.com/gis-ops/tutorials/blob/master/qgis/QGIS_SimplePlugin.md" cache_ttl="3600" cache_strategy="static"]
Publish Jupyter notebook from Github
[git-github-jupyter url="https://github.com/GIScience/openrouteservice-examples/blob/master/python/ortools_pubcrawl.ipynb"]
Publish from a private repository
[git-bitbucket-jupyter user=nilsnolde token=3292_2p3a_84-2af url="https://bitbucket.org/nilsnolde/test-wp-plugin/src/master/README.md"]
Display last commit and document URL from Bitbucket
[git-bitbucket-checkout url="https://bitbucket.org/nilsnolde/test-wp-plugin/src/master/README.md"]
Display commit history from Gitlab
git-gitlab-history limit=5 url="https://gitlab.com/nilsnolde/esy-osm-pbf/-/blob/master/README.md"]
Use additional CSS classes to style
The following example will put a dashed box around the whole post:
[git-add-css classes="md-dashedbox"]
[git-github-checkout url="https://github.com/gis-ops/tutorials/blob/master/qgis/QGIS_SimplePlugin.md"]
[git-github-markdown url="https://github.com/gis-ops/tutorials/blob/master/qgis/QGIS_SimplePlugin.md"]
[git-github-history url="https://github.com/gis-ops/tutorials/blob/master/qgis/QGIS_SimplePlugin.md"]
[/git-add-css]
With the following CSS file contents enqueued to your theme:
div.md_dashedbox {
position: relative;
font-size: 0.75em;
border: 3px dashed;
padding: 10px;
margin-bottom:15px
}
div.md_dashedbox div.markdown-github {
color:white;
line-height: 20px;
padding: 0px 5px;
position: absolute;
background-color: #345;
top: -3px;
left: -3px;
text-transform:none;
font-size:1em;
font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;
}
Installation
WordPress.org
The newest release of the plugin can be installed via WordPress plugin store under the name Documents from Git.
Newest master
The newest version, which might not have made it into the plugin store yet, can be installed via the WP Pusher plugin.
Contributions from other projects
Troubleshooting
Images
Images cannot (yet) be referenced with a relative link, i.e. [some_image](./some_image.jpg) won't work, as WordPress will try to access the image relative to your WordPress installation, e.g. https://myblog.com/some_image.jpg. See #15 for a discussion on the topic.
The solution is to either
- upload the image to WordPress and use the provided link
- push the Markdown file to the cloud, view the file in the browser and copy the provider-generated image address
- put the images in a repository folder and reference absolute links to your repository's raw files
Note, the last two options might be more involved when the image (alongside the Markdown file) is hosted in a private repository. Either the provider provides a token-authenticated URL for hosted images which you can use (see. e.g. [#13](https://github.com/gis-ops/wordpr