custom elements as pages (aka one off page templates)

[thescientist13]

Type of Change

• New Feature Request
• Documentation / Website
• Improvement / Suggestion
• Bug
• Other (please clarify below)

Summary

Currently to generate a page, Greenwood goes through the pages directory and builds out a route for every .md file.

src/
  pages/
    about.md
    index.md

However, if you predominantly want to write a page in just JavaScript to generate HTML content dynamically you would have to do something like this in a page template instead:

const postsData = [/* some array of  "post" objects */];
const postsList = postsData.map(item => {
  return html`<li>${item.title}</li>`;
})

...

render() {
   return html`
     <ul>
        ${ postsList }
     </ul>
   `
}

Basically every page needs a markdown file and a template. This is great for many to one (many pages, one template) but if your page is better authored as JavaScript, you still need to create two files.

Details

So it would be great to see if maybe doing something like this would essentially treat about.js as a Template by default?

src/
  pages/
    about.js
    index.md

This way, if you have one off or JavaScript heavy pages, you only have to make one file for it.

Additionally, it would make sense that the templates folder would essentially just be a collection of layouts, which is most useful when stamping out many pages of the same structure (like a blog post)

[thescientist13]

This may end up falling under / becoming its own RFC.

[thescientist13]

Another great use case would be for projectevergreen.github.io. For more "webapp" like projects, being able to use JS to author a page would be really nice. This would allow the project to extract out all the home page content into a custom element instead of stuffing the page-template full of code just to serialize some JS.

[thescientist13]

I think this might be invalid now that all users can build up their pages anyway they want now?

[thescientist13]

not needed, templates / pages are HTML first now in v0.10.0