gray-matter VS Bulma

Writing in markdown is super convenient, and supported by just about any text editor. To convert these .md files to browser-ready HTML, I wrote a simple little Node.js script using two great npm packages called gray-matter and showdown.

Next, install gray-matter to extract metadata from the front matter of markdown files, and marked to convert the markdown files to HTML:

It turns out that Docusaurus uses an open source JavaScript parser called gray-matter to parse the front matter from markdown files! After installing gray-matter using npm and them importing it into the markdownUtils.ts file, all it takes is calling the matter method and passing the markdown file contents to get returned an Object with data and content (the data being the front matter and the content being the rest of the markdown file contents).

Although we are building a custom table of contents, we won't have to write everything from scratch. To separate the Markdown/MDX content from the front matter, we'll use the Gray-matter package. It is optional in case you don't have front matter in your Markdown files. To process the Markdown itself, we'll use the Remark package. We'll also need the unist-util-visit package for traversing node trees and mdast-util-to-string for getting the text content of a node.

In this article we walk you through the process of creating a simple blog app using the popular React framework NextJS, gray-matter and next-mdx-remote.

In order to get post information (such as author, title, date, etc.) from our HTML without having them be apart of our rendered post we need a way to parse YAML front matter, this is where gray-matter comes in hand.

To do this, we use the matter npm package.

It’s actually not part of the CommonMark spec, so you’ll often need a 3rd party library to parse it out on top of your Markdown parser. In JavaScript we use gray-matter which converts frontmatter into a JS object we can more easily use.

Over the past few weeks, I mostly wrote on how to template a Node.js application with EJS using Express. Then, I wrote an article showing how to create a Markdown blog in Node.js using EJS, Express, gray-matter and markdown-it. Today, I'll combine those tutorials to turn the Markdown blog, from the last tutorial, into a simple SSG.

gray-matter, to parse the front matter from the Markdown files

Tailwind is great, but creating everything from scratch is annoying. A nice base of components which can be extended with tailwind would be great. There are a few tailwind frameworks like Flowbite, Daisy Ui, but I like Bulma, PicoCSS and Bootstrap.

I would talk about building the frontend, but it is just a single page React app I built quickly. It does use a CSS library called Bulma, which is similar to tailwind and worth checking out. I did spend a day implementing a login/signup page, but this was just for the learning experience, and not what I wanted in the final product.

After finding a few spare hours I decided to address the alerts and update some my dependencies. I spent several hours debugging my Gatsby site after doing some recommended npm package updates. My UI class library Bulma was not being loaded by my sass-loader module. (I later learned that they migrated to dart-sass so I guess the fix should have been a pretty easy). Nonetheless, this prompted me to rethink my entire static site generator stack and got me curious about some other options. Why have these unnecessarily complex dependency chains? At that point I was almost too hesitant to even touch my package.json file. That's just silly.

Oh wow, quite happy about this, for a while it seemed the project was abandoned, really glad Jeremy keeps working on this :) The new website (https://bulma.io/) also looks very slick. I could totally see that he'd be able to monetize this like Tailwind, it's a really well thought-out framework with a good compromise between responsiveness, utility classes and components.

So, our post.component.html component is the generic page where all posts will have their content loaded. Here, the classes are from the Bulma CSS framework, and the template looks like this:

This is a pretty basic HTML that contains a form with a couple of form fields and a submit button. To make styling a little easier, I opted to use Bulma. But that’s entirely optional, and does nothing to impact our app.

Since v1.9.0 release, the Gowebly CLI includes support for Bootstrap and Bulma CSS frameworks.

Bulma is a lightweight and modern CSS framework that simplifies the styling of your web projects. It offers a clean and intuitive set of classes to structure and design your HTML elements, providing a quick and easy way to create visually appealing layouts. Bulma is responsive and mobile-friendly, making it an excellent choice for developers who want a straightforward and flexible solution for their projects. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced coder, Bulma's simplicity and versatility make it a popular option for building stylish and responsive web interfaces without the need for extensive customization.