Creating a draft

Because Preacher leverages existing software and practices, there are multiple ways of creating a drafted article, without using custom Preacher logic.

Make each program do one thing well. By focusing on a single task, a program can eliminate much extraneous code that often results in excess overhead, unnecessary complexity, and a lack of flexibility.

As such, Preacher has no own implementation to facilitate drafts. However, because it elevates GIT, the user is still able to use drafts with one of the following recipes.

Use a draft folder

One can choose to put all drafts in /draft and then add the following to your GIT ignore file:

/draft/*.html

This will ensure everything that is generated inside /draft/ will not be stored in version control.

A side effect is that all drafts will be generated each time Preacher is run. This is because the published date is based on the date at which the output was first added to version control. Since that never happens, it is always right now and thus the generator wants to generate its output.

Extension .draft.md

If you safe your draft files as file.draft.md instead of file.md and add the following to your GIT ignore:

*.draft.html

Then the same rules apply as with the previous recipe, only then without using a dedicated folder for drafts.

The pro is that your file hierarchy can be determined up-front.

If you want to list all files that are currently in draft, try:

find -name *.draft.md

This will give you a list of all files that are still in draft. As opposed to the separate draft folder, you need this in order to keep you from forgetting which articles are still in draft.

Don't commit

The simplest recipe is also the easiest one to get wrong. Simply don't commit the output files you don't want published. The downside to this is that you can easily mistype a command and add it still, by accident.

Add sense to your draft commits

It's easy to skip on a good commit message. If you are writing a draft, it may be really useful to look at its history if you get back to it after a while.