Pelican Related Posts and Translation

The Pelican source code has a related_posts attribute defined in the Generator class. The variable is initialized as a blank list and is not used in the program. I do a Google search and find a plugin called related_posts in the pelican plugin repo. The related_posts plugin has a one page documentation.

Related Posts Plugin

Related posts could be a useful function for a blog site like this. When I start a new blog post, it is often related to a previous post. It’s logical to add links to previous related posts either on a sidebar or at the bottom of the new article. Here are the steps to setup the plugin.

• Create a sub-directory plugin in the project directory. Copy the related_posts directory to the plugin. It includes three files __init__.py, related_posts.py, and Readme.rst.
• In this site, posts with same tags should not be counted as related posts, so I comment out the lines 37 to 53 in the related_posts.py file.
• Add the following settings to pelicanconf.py.

PLUGIN_PATHS = ['plugin/', ]
PLUGINS=['related_posts',]

• Add the following html snippet to the article.html template file after statement {{ article.content }}.

{% if article.related_posts %}
<div class="mt-5 border-top">
  <h3>Related Posts:</h3>
  <ul>
    {% for related_post in article.related_posts %}
    <li><a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ related_post.url }}">
      {{ related_post.title }}</a></li>
    {% endfor %}
  </ul>
</div>
{% endif %}

• Add a meta field to the post. The contents of the field are slugs of previous posts.

related_posts: print-source-code-paper, pelican-source-code-plugin, ...

After those steps, each article will have a section “Related Posts” like on this page if the post includes a meta field related_posts.

Translation

This site does not have any translated articles. But I find it is not difficult to translate articles to other languages with Pelican after reading the source code.

You can set a meta field such as lang: es for a translated article. The article should have the same slug as the original one. Then, you can add the following html snippet on the artilce.html template. The page will have a link to the translated article in another language.

{% if article.translations %}
  <hr>
  {% for art in article.translations %}
      <p><a href="{{ art.url }}">{{ art.title }}</a> in language
      {% if art.lang == 'en' %} 
          English
      {% elif art.lang == 'es' %}
          Spanish
      {% endif %} 
      </p>
  {% endfor %}
{% endif %}