MMD-CMS has support for "make"

02/26/2010 19:55:36

I’ve been quite happy with using MultiMarkdown-CMS to run my web site. The main frustration has been when I make a change that requires rebuilding the entire site. I had to use a bunch of commands to run MultiMarkdown over various directories and subdirectories in order to rebuild the entire site, and then remember to rebuild the vector map index so that the similar pages feature works.

Inspired by the Makefile support in Dr. Drang’s personal wiki project, I decided it was time to learn a little make myself…. After a little fiddling around, I created a Makefile that allows me to rebuild my entire site with one simple command:

make

If there are any text files that do not have a corresponding html file, make runs the proper mmd2web.pl command to generate the missing page(s). Then it runs the map_my_site command to rebuild the vector map. The nice thing is that if there are no new pages, the vector map is left alone.

This means that I can run the make command without fear of unnecessarily rebuilding anything. If any files have changed, they get rebuilt. If anything is missing, it gets rebuilt. Otherwise, leave it alone.

A bonus feature is that I can remove all of the html files with a simple:

make clean

Not sure why I would want to do this, but it’s neat that I can.

To use the make command, you will need to change the path to mmd2web.pl in Makefile to match your system. But that should be pretty straightforward.

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Old Comments

Dear Mr Penney,

this has been your weekend for me: I discovered Scrivener through your Site, re-installed MultiMarkdow (once again for fresh) and generally had a good time :-). E. g. I went to my blog and did a complete redesign. I even found a way to make it show “hanging” quotation marks for blockquotes … (oh, I’m geeking out.).

I came here to say thank you and tell you that you inspired me to change my blog over from Tumblr to MultiMarkdown CMS on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. I have been wondering for long if I shouldn’t set up my blog with blosxom, just like our company website. As blosxom is lacking a proper comments feature (among other things) I am, as I said, tempted to try MMD CMS instead.

Am I not totally clueless when I say I suppose you got some inspiration from blosxom yourself?

Best regards, Christoph Freitag

Actually, I was one of the (relatively) early programmers of a few blosxom plugins. It was the first weblog software that I used and then programmed for.

Then I migrated to OddMuse, then to Movable Type, and then on to my homebuilt solution.