What I learnt

HACKING THE METADATA for better access:

Now the liquid metadata tag {{}} does nothing but replaces that part of the file. So if we want a page to have different feature or theme we can just write html code in the metadata value.

Porting a new theme to siteleaf:

Now most of the themes are on github for siteleaf so all we need do is clone or download theme and then push them to siteleaf using the sitelead push theme command. Now all we need to do is create pages and fill into that using metadata and body liquid text replacement scheme.

Creating a new theme:

Doesn’t matter if you already have a theme or not. Mostly the text needs to change. Mostly the repetitive part of every page like title and the navigation bar needs to be replaced by liquid variables or metadata. For eg. Title text can be replaced by {{title}} and the site title can be replaced by {{site.title}} For a navigation bar with all the pages we can create a menu using the looping through liquid template given above.

Layouts

Now if we port a theme from anywhere we’ll always have some sort misalignment and that alignment can be corrected by the {{content}} and {{%capturecontent%}} tag. Anyway the link below will explain it better than me.

Access Control

It has good access control rights.

Admin – controls everything including themes

Publisher – controls everything except themes

Author – controls only their very own post.

Owner - Has all access.

It can all be done on the website in the users link in the sidebar.

Github

Access to github is easy we just need to fill in the name of the repository and the username in the settings tab and click on github.

What I think and observed:

It’s an awesome tool but it is actually cloud based which means you can develop locally the themes and stuff which would be the basic layout of the website; but to develop webpages you’ll have to use their Siteleaf development website and the hard thing about that for a developer is that they only get access to the body part using html and markdown on the development environment. All the other styling css, sass, jquery and javascript is in the themes part of the project and it is developed locally mostly.

So the obvious gap is I want access to all my files in one go but I don’t get that. I have to develop the header and default part of the code which is the general layout locally cause it’s faster and whatever is the content needs to on done on the cloud. It’s a true CMS for a Blog Maker; hence it is good only to post data in faster portable and light environment with great predefined themes (available on github) and really good user experience manner (I think UI for a blogging website is not something to blab about it’s just animation and stuff kind of ostentatious without the actual work)

Disadvantage

I cannot develop webpages and there content locally. As you know it work like the git concept for the local development; so, when we pull the siteleaf website then we are essentially pulling the theme and none of the pages. Hence the page source code is generated on the fly and hence it gets a bit difficult for development because we never see an actual HTML website file on our local machine just the themes and stuff are visible to us and can be edited.

Advantage

The best part about the siteleaf would be its integration with github. We can do the while version controlling. Hence the theme for the website can be picked up from github and we can very well do version control from git.