Pollen Notes: File types

Pollen provides a few different file extensions. I found the layout of the tutorials a bit confusing — tell me what everything is and then dive into the details, please! This is the very short overview I wish I had when I started.

.

The null filetype — this is useful for dodging .gitignore rules such as *.html.

.ptree

A meta filetyle — it is not rendered directly, but directs pollen as to what files should be rendered. You may use more than one of these. Typically there is an index.ptree at the root of a project. You may also include subtrees by reference.

This is most useful importing content from a sub-page, for example:

◊(require (prefix-in sub: "sub.ptree"))
item-a
item-b
◊sub:doc
item-y
item-z

I would use this with a single sub-directory with many pages. That is to say, in a blog (more at Nesting pagetrees, specifically section 14.5.3).

.pp

This extension stands for Pollen Preprocessor (or maybe just PreProcessor) — it is processed by Pollen and then fed into template.html.*.

.pm

This is the first of two “authoring suffices,” which means these are intended for writing content as opposed to, uh, coding. This one is text, and Pollen.

.pmd

This is the second of the two authoring suffices. It is a marriage of Pollen, text, and MarkDown. It is noteworthy that this converts plaint quotes (i.e. ") to smart quotes (i.e. “ and ”).