Snow gets Drafts!

posted on 07 Nov 2013 | Snow

A special thanks goes out to @johanilsson for this new feature!

Snow now ships with Drafts and Privates, this is a really cool feature since it allows you to create drafts, and a page to list all drafts (optional).

What are the options

There are three options for a published state:

draft
private
true

Draft is basically a finished or rough cut blog post that you will publish soon, it will be compiled to /drafts URL and be publicly accessible (either via a known page or the direct URL)

Private is a post that will not be compiled at all, this will stay as markdown, good for when you want to begin writing something but not have it show up online yet.

True, this is optional, but its basically the same as not supplying the published state at all. It will compile your post and make it publicly available.

How do I do it?!?

In the header of your markdown file, simply add a new property called published and away you go!

---
title: Snow gets Drafts! 
layout: post
categories: Snow 
published: draft
---

Where does it go?

Your file should be located where all your other posts go. Using this post as an example:

As well as the same header as above, with published set to draft, I can now compile the site.

We get this new drafts folder. The folder structure is the same as a normal post, so the file name and chosen slug will dictate the URL.

Given this information, the URL would be:

http://www.philliphaydon.com/drafts/2013/11/snow-gets-drafts/

Neat huh?

What about that viewing page you told me about?!?

To create a viewing page of all drafts, we can create a brand new template in the root of our Snow folder called drafts.cshtml

The contents is super simple:

@inherits Nancy.ViewEngines.Razor.NancyRazorViewBase<Snow.ViewModels.ContentViewModel>
@using System.Collections.Generic
@{
  Layout = "default.cshtml";
}

<header>
    <div class="head-inner">
        <h1>Drafts</h1>
    </div>
</header>

<ul class="category-list fancy-container darkishblue">
@foreach(var draft in Model.Drafts){
  <li><a href="@draft.Url" title="@draft.Title">@draft.Title</a></li>
}
</ul>

This is how I have mine marked up, similar to how my archive pages work.

Next, add it to the config file.

This is a snippet of my config

},{
    "file": "archive.cshtml"
},{
    "file": "drafts.cshtml",
    "loop": "Drafts"
},{
    "file": "about.cshtml"
},{

And that's it, now we can compile our Snow site.

Bam we have a new index file, and it has listed out the current drafts.

<header>
    <div class="head-inner">
        <h1>Drafts</h1>
    </div>
</header>

<ul class="category-list fancy-container darkishblue">
  <li><a href="/drafts//2013/11/snow-gets-drafts/" title="Snow gets Drafts!">Snow gets Drafts!</a></li>
</ul>

That's all there is to it.

Things to note.

Snow has some Razor helpers for things like Analytics. If you're using the helper:

@Html.RenderGoogleAnalytics("UA-######-##")

Then Snow will not render any analytically code for the Draft index or compiled Draft Posts. This means Google wont pick it up unless you link to it somewhere. (considering adding a helper to set no-cache and such in the header)

Anyway that's it, the new Drafts feature in Snow. Thanks again to @johanilsson for implementing this for us!