gray-matter VS docsify

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

Docsify is frequently updated; the latest release was on June 24, 2023, and the most recent update was on December 17, 2023. It is MIT-licensed and has an active Discord community.

okay new plan, does anyone know how to do this docsify on github? i obviously am a noob on github and recently on reddit. I'd like to help where i can but my knowlegde seems to be my handycap. i could provide you a trash-mail, if you need one, but i need a PO (product owner) to manage the git... i have no clue about this yet (pages and functions and stuff)

The tools to author it aren't that important, frankly. Ask your audience what they're most comfortable using and try to meet them there.

If the stakeholders are technical, you have more options. If they aren't, I hope you like Google Docs or Word, because if you give them anything other than that or a PDF, they'll probably complain. At worst, yeah, write it in a long Markdown text file and use tools like pandoc to transform that into other formats as needed.

If you do need a website and you're not generating enterprise-scale amounts of content (and it sounds like you're not) try things that let you avoid needing build steps and infrastructure if at all possible, so you can iterate and deploy changes with as little friction as you can.

Tools like Docsify[1] can take a pile of Markdown files and serve a site out of them, client- or server-side, without a static build step. Depending on the org, you can get away with GitHub's default rendering of Markdown in a repo. Most static site builds for stuff your scale are overengineered instances of premature optimization.

Past those initial hurdles, the format and tools challenges are all in maintenance. How can you:

- most easily keep the content up to date

- delegate updates as the staff grows or changes

- proactively distribute updates ASAP to the people who'd most benefit from receiving them

That's going to depend a lot more on who'll contribute updates, what their technical proficiency's like, and how they prefer to communicate. It might be a shared git repo and RSS or Slack notifications if they're comfortable with those things, and it might be a Google Doc and email if they're like most non-technical stakeholders.

1: https://docsify.js.org

Big fan of https://docsify.js.org since theres no need to compile your static site. A small amount of js just renders markdown.

If you are searching for examples of an arbitrary Jellyfin support site, visit https://travisflix.com/help/#/support (or help.travisflix.com which redirects to the /help/ URI of the TLD) to take a look at what I have done with docsify on Github Pages.

*Leantime - Competitor to OP? Updated recently, uses Docsify, no demo :(

There are a lot of open-source projects that can help businesses to save time and money. For example, we created a Free Admin panel a few months ago https://github.com/altence/lightence-admin That's an example of free documentation generator https://github.com/docsifyjs/docsify There are a lot more examples. And I want to find an idea of some similar generic solutions that can help various types of businesses