Content Pipeline Concepts

A content pipeline turns source files into pages. Ferromark supplies Markdown parsing, document structure, and HTML rendering. The surrounding application owns storage, metadata deserialization, templates, routing, CSS, and deployment.

Metadata belongs to your application

Front matter is raw YAML- or TOML-style text. Extract it before rendering, then validate it with the schema your application uses. Heading text and IDs support navigation; match the renderer's slug rules, explicit IDs, and duplicate suffixes. An inline [[toc]] marker can produce a rendered table of contents where enabled.

Keep presentation explicit

Table and column classes let CSS control layout. Code-rendering hooks let a highlighter supply escaped HTML. Translation stays outside the parser. Decide which input is trusted before selecting the HTML policy.

Select the API for the output

Rust pipelines cover owned HTML, append helpers, arena ASTs, and allocator lifetimes. Node.js pipelines cover strings, Buffers, metadata, and reusable renderers. Both support optional front-matter extraction; their API names and defaults differ.

For deployment under a subpath, configure site routing explicitly. Check links, images, and raw HTML URLs on representative pages. See rendering and trust and configuration.