Publican v0.6.1 update

Publican v0.6.1 was released on March 19, 2025. Please see the breaking changes.

Markdown conversion improvements #

Markdown containing ${ expressions } can cause problems when converting to HTML. Version 0.6.0 attempted to comment out expressions, but this was not reliable and could prevent markdown-it adding surrounding tags.

The markdown conversion has been rewritten. Publican v0.6.1 extracts all expressions before the HTML is generated. Expressions are then reinserted. Those inside <code> blocks are HTML-encoded unless you’ve used a ${{ double bracket }}.

The benefits:

• expression rendering and syntax coloring has improved
• the quantity of HTML code has reduced in some cases, and
• performance is better. A full site build is up to 15% faster than v0.6.0.

Refer to jsTACS Template literals in markdown for more information.

Front matter debug value #

In v0.6.0 and below, setting a debug value in front matter presumed debugging was enabled no matter what value you used.

From v0.6.1, setting:

debug: false

disables debugging. Any other value – even an empty string – enables debugging.

Breaking changes #

In v0.6.0 only, an expression on a single line such as:

markdown source

${ data.title }

is rendered without surrounding tags:

HTML output

This Page's Title

v0.6.1 renders the expression inside HTML paragraph tag:

HTML output

<p>This Page's Title</p>

If you need a different tag, you can use an HTML snippet in the markdown, e.g.

markdown source

<div>${ data.title }</div>

Or you can use HTML comments when no tags are required. These are ignored by the browser and removed during minification.

markdown source

<!-- -->${ data.title }<!-- -->

Note that malformed or invalid expressions are more likely to break Publican’s build process.

Get started #

The Publican documentation provides a quick start guide, a detailed set-up guide, API references, and common recipes you can use and adapt for your own projects.

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