Authoring Pages

How to author content

Use a text editor such as Sublime Text, WebStorm, IntelliJ, or Atom to create pages. Atom is recommended because it’s created by Github, which is driving some of the Jekyll development through Github Pages.

Where pages are kept

Some of the documentation is in the /pages folder under the loopback.io repository. In that folder, English documentation is in en, and other languages are in folders with the name of the ISO language code (for example, fr for French).

Under English, the sub-folders are:

• lb2 - LoopBack 2.x
• lb3 - LoopBack 3.0
• lb4 - LoopBack 4
• contrib - Information on contributing to the project, published at http://loopback.io/doc/en/contrib/.
• community - Area where community members can put information about their LoopBack-related projects.

However, for LoopBack 4, the documentation is sourced from the /docs/site folder in the loopback-next repository.

Overview content

The site includes some non-documentation “technical overview” information that pre-dates the move of the documentation to the site. For the most part, we don’t expect community members to edit this information, though anyone is welcome to report inaccuracies or problems. This content includes:

• The home page, index.html
• Other “overview” content pages:
  • contributing/index.html
  • examples/index.html
  • getting-started/index.html
  • resources/index.html
  • users/index.html
• Overview layout in _layouts/overview.html
• Include files in _includes/overview/

Frontmatter

Make sure each page has frontmatter at the top like this:

---
title: Alerts
tags: [formatting]
keywords: notes, tips, cautions, warnings, admonitions

summary: "You can insert notes, tips, warnings, and important alerts in your content."
sidebar: contrib_sidebar
permalink: /doc/en/contrib/alerts.html
---

Front matter is always formatted with three hyphens at the top and bottom. Your front matter must have a title and permalink value. All the other values are optional.

Note that you cannot use variables in front matter.

The following table describes each of the front matter that you can use with this theme:

Colons in page titles

If you want to use a colon in your page title, you must enclose the title’s value in quotation marks.

Page names and excluding files from outputs

By default, everything in your project is included in the output. To exclude files that don’t belong to that project, specify the file name, the folder name, or use wildcards in the _config.yml configuration file:

exclude:

- filename.md
- subfolder_name/
- mydoc_*
- gitignore

Wildcards will exclude every match after the *.

Saving pages as drafts

If you add published: false in the front matter, your page won’t be published. You can also move draft pages into the _drafts folder to exclude them from the build. With posts, you can also keep them as drafts by omitting the date in the title.

Markdown or HTML format

Pages can be either Markdown or HTML format (specified through either an .md or .html file extension).

If you use Markdown, you can also include HTML formatting where needed. But if you’re format is HTML, you must add a markdown="1" attribute to the element in order to use Markdown inside that HTML element:

<div markdown="1">This is a [link](http://exmaple.com).</div>

For your Markdown files, note that a space or two indent will set text off as code or blocks, so avoid spacing indents unless intentional.

If you have a lot of HTML, as long as the top and bottom tags of the HTML are flush left in a Markdown file, all the tags inside those bookend HTML tags will render as HTML, regardless of their indentation. (This can be especially useful for tables.)

Kramdown Markdown

This theme uses kramdown markdown.

This mostly aligns with Github-flavored Markdown, with a few differences.

The configuration file shows the Markdown processor and extension:

highlighter: rouge
markdown: kramdown
kramdown:
 input: GFM
 auto_ids: true
 hard_wrap: false
 syntax_highlighter: rouge

List item formatting

Kramdown requires you to line up the indent between list items with the first starting character after the space in your list item numbering.

The spacing of the intercepting text must align with the spacing of the first character after the space of a numbered list item. Basically, with your list item numbering, use two spaces after the dot in the number, like this:

1.  First item
2.  Second item
3.  Third item

See this blog post on Kramdown and Rouge for more details.

When you want to insert paragraphs, notes, code snippets, or other matter in between the list items, use four spaces to indent. The four spaces will line up with the first letter of the list item (the First or Second or Third).

1.  First item

    ```
    alert("hello");
    ```

2.  Second item

    Some pig!

3.  Third item

You can use standard Multi-markdown syntax for tables. You can also use fenced code blocks with lexers specifying the type of code.

Automatic mini-TOCs

By default, a TOC appears at the top of your pages and posts. If you don’t want the TOC to appear for a specific page, such as for a landing page or other homepage, add toc: false in the front matter of the page.

The mini-TOC requires you to use the ## Markdown syntax for headings. If you use <h2> elements, you must add an ID attribute for the heading element in order for it to appear in the mini-TOC (for example, <h2 id="mysampleid">Heading</h2>.

By default, the table of contents will include all heading levels. To limit the level of headings included, use either the toc_level property in page frontmatter or, if using the {% include toc.html %} include directly, use the level property.

For example, to display only top-level headings (head2s or ## headings), use:

• toc_level: 1 in frontmatter
• {% include toc.html level=1 %} inline

In both cases, the level can be from 1 to 4.

Headings

Use pound signs before the heading title to designate the level. Note that kramdown requires headings to have one space before and after the heading. Without this space above and below, the heading won’t render into HTML.

Since the page title is considered the “top-level” heading, highest-level headings in a page are “second-level” headings.

## Second-level heading

Result:

Second-level heading

### Third-level heading

Result:

Third-level heading

#### Fourth-level heading

Result:

Fourth-level heading

Headings with ID Tags

If you want to use a specific ID tag with your heading, add it like this:

## Headings with ID Tags {#someIdTag}

Then you can reference it with a link like this on the same page:

[Some link](#someIdTag)

Result:

Some link

Specify a particular page layout

The default layout for pages is “page” layout.

To specify a different layout, use the layout property in the page’s frontmatter.

Comments

Disqus, a commenting system, is integrated into the theme. In the configuration file, specify the Disqus code for the universal code, and Disqus will appear. If you don’t add a Disqus value, the Disqus form isn’t included.