Support for pelican style metadata format in nikola

This post was originally on my old/other blog which was build using pelican, so some of the references here may not make sense

Few years ago, python.__init__ podcast had invited creators of two most popular static site generators written in python i.e. pelican and nikola

In that episode, they were asked why do these two SSGs have different meta data format (aka front matter). While I don't remember “why” but Roberto Alsina of Nikola had suggested that he would support other metadata formats for better compatibility.

This was back in 2015.

Fast forward to 2017.

Nikola has delivered on that promise.

Latest version of nikola now supports pelican style among other formats. It also supports YAML and TOML style front matters used by other non-pythonic SSGs like Hugo and Jekyll

This is a BIG deal.

This allows me to easily share the same source between variety of SSGs without having to port the posts.

I can easily cross-post the exact same content between pelican and nikola, like I just did (See footer)

I can “move” from nikola to hugo (which I have been thinking about a lot, since Hugo has lot of nicer themes. Nikola - not so much) I can continue to use nikola, but use YAML/TOML style front matter, and one day BOOM, just run hugo compiler to generate the entire site in hugo. Off course, this is easier said than done. But at least there won't be any “porting”

I can use tools like nikola new_post across the SSGs. In fact I just did that for this post. pelican doesn't have such command, AFAIK, so created the skeleton using nikola's new_post command, moved over the generated file to pelican blog area, and started writing.