Ecosystem updates 2022 Q1

I planned the next post as the release announcement of Metalsmith 2.5, but some release features were tougher than I antipicated. I'm almost there though, so bear with me. In the meantime, I'm bringing you an overview of the tons of other updates in the first 4 months of 2022 in the metalsmith ecosystem.

Metalsmith is growing

First off, metalsmith has been seeing some steady growth on NPM: the 2.4.x releases have been installed 4x as much in 4 months as the last stable release had in 6 years!

New plugins

3 revamped/ new core plugins:

• @metalsmith/postcss was adopted and updated from the older metalsmith-postcss. It now also supports source maps for builds using @metalsmith/sass.
• The new @metalsmith/requests plugin allows you to fetch content from other sites and API's and attach them to metadata or file contents. Ideal for aggregating data or connecting a headless CMS to the metalsmith build.
• The old metalsmith-metadata plugin has moved to @metalsmith/metadata and was updated to be more powerful and consistent.

14 community plugins by emmercm were also updated and added to the plugin registry.

New metalsmith starter repo's

Werner Glinka has become co-maintainer for some parts of the metalsmith core repositories (website, plugin registry, remove plugin, more to come). He is a long-time metalsmith (professional) user and has contributed a lot in the way of exchanging ideas, reviewing and creating metalsmith starters:

• wernerglinka/metalsmith-bare-bones-starter: Bare-bones metalsmith starter with markdown & Nunjucks templating | Demo
• wernerglinka/metalsmith-blog-starter: Blog metalsmith starter with markdown & Nunjucks templating + a landing page & some sample articles | Demo
• wernerglinka/metalsmith-company-starter: Company site starter with markdown & Nunjucks templating | Demo

Website updates

• The plugins registry now also searches on user name and supports a search parameter: for example https://metalsmith.io/plugins/?search=metalsmith will display all core plugins first.

Last but not least: Metalsmith 2.5 should be ready for the end of May, and the new docs will soon replace the front-page docs :)
Cheers!