Content material filters in Feather CMS

The anatomy of a content material filter

Once you create a weblog put up or a static web page in Feather you should utilize the markdown filter to render the ultimate illustration of the saved content material. It’s also doable to spotlight Swift code snippets although one other filter. These content material filters are altering the underlying information in dynamic manner at runtime, Feather solely saves the unique information within the persistent srorage utilizing Fluent. 💪

This method permits us to rework varied textual content values utilizing manually chosen filters for every particular person frontend associated content material. For instance you may allow the markdown filter for put up A, however should you want to make use of HTML for put up B you may disable the markdown filter and write your article utilizing the great previous HyperText Markup Language.

Content material filters can be utilized to create your personal shortcodes. In WordPress shortcode is a small piece of code, indicated by brackets, that may carry out a devoted perform. By utilizing Feather you do not have to place shortcodes into brackets, however you may change something you need based mostly by yourself guidelines. Curse phrases? No downside. Print one thing utilizing Swift? Why not.

The one factor that you must remember that content material filters are operating in a synchronous manner. Be as quick as doable, since they are going to block the execution thread. In many of the instances this isn’t an enormous deal, however I simply wished to let you recognize that you just will not be capable of return a future this time. 🚀

Methods to create a content material filter for Feather?

Content material filters are supplied by modules, which means that you must write a Feather CMS module first. Don’t fret an excessive amount of, a module might be fairly easy, in our case it is simply going to be one Swift file. We’re going to write a filter that is going to exchange the fuck phrase with a duck emoji. 🦆

import Vapor
import Fluent
import ViperKit

closing class DuckFilterModule: ViperModule {

    static var title: String = "duck-filter"

    func invokeSync(title: String, req: Request, params: [String: Any]) -> Any? {
        change title {
        case "content-filter":
            return [DuckFilter()]
        default:
            return nil
        }
    }
}

Simply place the code from above into a brand new file referred to as DuckFilterModule.swift contained in the Modules listing. We’ve to present the module a reputation, that is going to be duck-filter after all, and we’ve to implement the invokeSync hook perform that ought to return a filter sort for the content-filter key. You may even return a number of filters per module if wanted.

Hook capabilities are fairly important in Feather CMS, modules can work collectively by dynamic hooks with out forming a dependency. This method may be very versatile and highly effective, you may construct and invoke your personal hooks by the ViperKit framework. If you wish to study extra about this modular structure, you can too seize a replica of my Sensible Server Aspect Swift ebook, it is written for Vapor 4 and you will discover ways to write a modular weblog engine utilizing Swift (similiar to Feather).

Anyway, again to the subject, we simply need to implement the DuckFilter object:

import Vapor
import ViperKit

struct DuckFilter: ContentFilter {
    var key: String { "duck-filter" }
    var label: String { "Duck" }

    func filter(_ enter: String) -> String {
        enter.replacingOccurrences(of: "fuck", with: "🦆")
    }
}

Mainly that is it. You simply have to change the configure.swift and append a DuckFilterModule() occasion to the module record. Now should you run Feather with this module you may allow the Duck filter on your contents below the content material editor admin interface. Oh by the way in which it can save you this filter below a ContentFilters/DuckFilter.swift listing subsequent to your module file.

Methods to invoke obtainable filters?

Let’s check out our newly created filter. Go to the admin and create a brand new static web page with the “I do not give a fuck” content material, nicely… it may be something that comprises the f phrase, simply be inventive. 🤔

Save the web page and preview it utilizing the attention icon. You need to see your authentic textual content. Now should you click on on the feather icon you may choose which filters must be enabled for this explicit content material. Test the Duck, save the content material particulars and reload the preview web page. You need to see the duckling. 🐥

These content material filters are programmatically obtainable for you. By calling the filter technique on any FrontendContentModel sort you may invoke the enabled filters on that content material, it will will let you rework an related mannequin worth utilizing filters.

let filteredValue = frontendContentModel.filter(myModel.contentToBeFiltered, req: req)

The one catch is that your Fluent mannequin must have an related content material sort since filters are tied to FrontendContentModel objects. In my earlier article I discussed easy methods to create a content material relation, however perhaps subsequent time I will create an extended put up in regards to the existence of this particular object in Feather CMS. In case you have points, feedbacks or concepts, please use GitHub or Twitter.