+++ title = "Overview" weight = 5 +++ ## Zola at a Glance Zola is a static site generator (SSG), similar to [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/), [Pelican](https://blog.getpelican.com/), and [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) (for a comprehensive list of SSGs, please see the [StaticGen](https://www.staticgen.com/) site). It is written in [Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org/) and uses the [Tera](https://tera.netlify.com/) template engine, which is similar to [Jinja2](https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/2.10.x/), [Django templates](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/topics/templates/), [Liquid](https://shopify.github.io/liquid/), and [Twig](https://twig.symfony.com/). Content is written in [CommonMark](https://commonmark.org/), a strongly defined, highly compatible specification of [Markdown](https://www.markdownguide.org/). SSGs use dynamic templates to transform content into static HTML pages. Static sites are thus very fast and require no databases, making them easy to host. A comparison between static and dynamic sites, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Django, can be found [here](https://dev.to/ashenmaster/static-vs-dynamic-sites-61f). To get a taste of Zola, please see the quick overview below. ## First Steps with Zola Unlike some SSGs, Zola makes no assumptions regarding the structure of your site. In this overview, we'll be making a simple blog site. ### Initialize Site > This overview is based on Zola 0.9. Please see the detailed [installation instructions for your platform](@/getting-started/installation.md). With Zola installed, let's initialize our site: ```bash $ zola init myblog ``` You will be asked a few questions. ``` > What is the URL of your site? (https://example.com): > Do you want to enable Sass compilation? [Y/n]: > Do you want to enable syntax highlighting? [y/N]: > Do you want to build a search index of the content? [y/N]: ``` For our blog, let's accept the default values (i.e., press Enter for each question). We now have a `myblog` directory with the following structure: ```bash ├── config.toml ├── content ├── sass ├── static ├── templates └── themes ``` Let's start the Zola development server with: ```bash $ zola serve Building site... -> Creating 0 pages (0 orphan), 0 sections, and processing 0 images ``` > This command must be run in the base Zola directory, which contains `config.toml`. If you point your web browser to , you should see a "Welcome to Zola" message. ### Home Page Let's make a home page. To do this, let's first create a `base.html` file inside the `templates` directory. This step will make more sense as we move through this overview. We'll be using the CSS framework [Bulma](https://bulma.io/). ```html MyBlog

{% block content %} {% endblock %}

``` Now, let's create an `index.html` file inside the `templates` directory. ```html {% extends "base.html" %} {% block content %}

This is my blog made with Zola.

{% endblock content %} ``` This tells Zola that `index.html` extends our `base.html` file and replaces the block called "content" with the text between the `{% block content %}` and `{% endblock content %}` tags. ### Content Directory Now let's add some content. We'll start by making a `blog` subdirectory in the `content` directory and creating an `_index.md` file inside it. This file tells Zola that `blog` is a [section](@/content/section.md), which is how content is categorized in Zola. ```bash ├── content │ └── blog │ └── _index.md ``` In the `_index.md` file, we'll set the following variables in [TOML](https://github.com/toml-lang/toml) format: ```md +++ title = "List of blog posts" sort_by = "date" template = "blog.html" page_template = "blog-page.html" +++ ``` > Note that although no variables are mandatory, the opening and closing `+++` are required. * *sort_by = "date"* tells Zola to use the date to order our section pages (more on pages below). * *template = "blog.html"* tells Zola to use `blog.html` in the `templates` directory as the template for listing the Markdown files in this section. * *page_template = "blog-page.html"* tells Zola to use `blog-page.html` in the `templates` directory as the template for individual Markdown files. For a full list of section variables, please see the [section](@/content/section.md) documentation. We will use *title = "List of blog posts"* in a template (see below). ### Templates Let's now create some more templates. In the `templates` directory, create a `blog.html` file with the following contents: ```html {% extends "base.html" %} {% block content %}

{{ page.title }}

{% endblock content %} ``` As done by `index.html`, `blog.html` extends `base.html`, but this time we want to list the blog posts. The *title* we set in the `_index.md` file above is available to us as `{{ section.title }}`. In the list below the title, we loop through all the pages in our section (`blog` directory) and output the page title and URL using `{{ page.title }}` and `{{ page.permalink | safe }}`, respectively. We use the `| safe` filter because the permalink doesn't need to be HTML escaped (escaping would cause `/` to render as `/`). If you go to , you will see the section page for `blog`. The list is empty because we don't have any blog posts. Let's fix that now. ### Markdown Content In the `blog` directory, create a file called `first.md` with the following contents: ```md +++ title = "My first post" date = 2019-11-27 +++ This is my first blog post. ``` The *title* and *date* will be available to us in the `blog-page.html` template as `{{ page.title }}` and `{{ page.date }}`, respectively. All text below the closing `+++` will be available to us as `{{ page.content }}`. We now need to make the `blog-page.html` template. In the `templates` directory, create this file with the contents: ```html {% extends "base.html" %} {% block content %}

{{ page.date }}

{{ page.content | safe }} {% endblock content %} ``` > Note the `| safe` filter for `{{ page.content }}`. This should start to look familiar. If you now go back to our blog list page at , you should see our lonely post. Let's add another. In the `content/blog` directory, let's create the file `second.md` with the contents: ```md +++ title = "My second post" date = 2019-11-28 +++ This is my second blog post. ``` Back at , our second post shows up on top of the list because it's newer than the first post and we had set *sort_by = "date"* in our `_index.md` file. As a final step, let's modify our home page to link to our blog posts. The `index.html` file inside the `templates` directory should be: ```html {% extends "base.html" %} {% block content %}

This is my blog made with Zola.

Click here to see my posts.

{% endblock content %} ``` This has been a quick overview of Zola. You can now dive into the rest of the documentation.