Creating Blog Posts

Introduction to Hyde Posts

Making blog posts with Hyde is easy. At the most basic level, all you need is to add a Markdown file to your _posts folder.

To use the full power of the Hyde post module you'll want to add YAML Front Matter to your posts.

You can interactively scaffold posts with automatic front matter using the HydeCLI:

php hyde make:post

Learn more about scaffolding posts, and other files, in the console commands documentation.

Short Video Tutorial

Best Practices and Hyde Expectations

Since Hyde does a lot of things automatically, there are some things you may need to keep in mind when creating blog posts so that you don't get unexpected results.

Filenames

Markdown post files are stored in the _posts directory
The filename is used as the filename for the compiled HTML
Filenames should use kebab-case-name followed by the extension .md
Files prefixed with _underscores are ignored by Hyde
Your post will be stored in _site/posts/<identifier>.html

Example:

✔ _posts/hello-world.md # Valid and will be compiled to _site/posts/hello-world.html

Date Prefixes

You optionally can set a blog post's publication date by prefixing the filename with a date in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD). Optionally, you can also include the time (HH-MM).

# Basic date prefix (sets date to 2024-11-05 00:00)
2024-11-05-my-first-post.md

# Date and time prefix (sets date to 2024-11-05 10:30)
2024-11-05-10-30-my-first-post.md

The date prefix will be:

Stripped from the route key (resulting in clean URLs like posts/my-first-post)
Used to set the post's publication date (unless explicitly defined in front matter)

Important notes:

Dates must be in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM)
Days and months must use leading zeros (e.g., 2024-01-05 not 2024-1-5)
Time is optional and uses 24-hour format with a hyphen separator (HH-MM)
Front matter dates take precedence over filename dates
Using date prefixes is entirely optional!

This feature provides an intuitive way to organize your blog posts chronologically while maintaining clean URLs, and matches the behavior of many popular static site generators for interoperability.

Front Matter

Front matter is optional, but highly recommended for blog posts as the front matter is used to construct dynamic HTML markup for the post as well as meta tags and post feeds.

You are encouraged to look at the compiled HTML to learn and understand how your front matter is used. You can read more about the Front Matter format in the Front Matter documentation.

Blog Post Example

Before digging deeper into all the supported options, let's take a look at what a basic post with front matter looks like.

Filepath: _posts/my-new-post.md---
title: My New Post
description: A short description used in previews and SEO
category: blog
author: Mr. Hyde
date: 2022-05-09 18:38
---

## Write Your Markdown Here

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit.
Autem aliquid alias explicabo consequatur similique,
animi distinctio earum ducimus minus, magnam.

Supported Front Matter Properties

Post Front Matter Schema

Here is a quick reference of the supported front matter properties. Keep on reading to see further explanations, details, and examples.

KEY NAME	VALUE TYPE	EXAMPLE / FORMAT
`title`	string	"My New Post"
`description`	string	"A short description"
`category`	string	"my favorite recipes"
`date`	string	"YYYY-MM-DD [HH:MM]"
`author`	string/array	See author section
`image`	string/array	See image section

Note that YAML here is pretty forgiving. In most cases you do not need to wrap strings in quotes. However, it can help in certain edge cases, for example if the text contains special Yaml characters, thus they are included here.

In the examples below, when there are multiple examples, they signify various ways to use the same property.

When specifying an array you don't need all the sub-properties. The examples generally show all the supported values.

Title

title: "My New Post"

Description

description: "A short description used in previews and SEO"

Date

date: "2022-01-01"

date: "2022-01-01 12:00"

Author

Specify a page author, either by a username for an author defined in the authors config, or by an arbitrary name, or by an array of author data.

Arbitrary name displayed "as is"

author: "Mr. Hyde"

Username defined in `authors` config

author: mr_hyde

Array of author data

author:
    # These are used in the default author templates
    name: "Mr. Hyde"
    username: mr_hyde
    website: https://twitter.com/HydeFramework

    # These are not used in the default author templates, but can be used in your custom views
    bio: "The mysterious author of HydePHP"
    avatar: avatar.png
    socials:
      twitter: "@HydeFramework"
      github: "hydephp"

When using an array, you don't need to include all properties. Specified values will override the corresponding entries in the authors config.

Note: Author usernames are automatically normalized (converted to lowercase with spaces replaced by underscores).

Image

Specify a cover image for the post, either by a local image path for a file in the _media/ directory, or by a full URL. Any array data is constructed into a dynamic fluent caption, and injected into post and page metadata.

Local image path

When supplying an image source with a local image path, the image is expected to be stored in the _media/ directory. Like all other media files, it will be copied to _site/media/ when the site is built, so Hyde will resolve links accordingly.

image: image.jpg

Full URL

Full URL starting with http(s)://) or // (protocol-relative). The image source will be used as-is, and no additional processing is done.

image: https://cdn.example.com/image.jpg

Data-rich image

You can also supply an array of data to construct a rich image with a fluent caption.

image:
    source: Local image path or full URL
    altText: "Alt text for image"
    titleText: "Tooltip title"
    copyright: "Copyright (c) 2022"
    licenseName: "CC-BY-SA-4.0"
    licenseUrl: https://example.com/license/
    authorUrl: https://photographer.example.com/
    authorName: "John Doe"

See posts/introducing-images for a detailed blog post with examples and schema information!

Using Images in Posts

To use images stored in the _media/ directory, you can use the following syntax:

![Image Alt](../media/image.png "Image Title")

Note the relative path since the blog post is compiled to posts/example.html

To learn more, check out the managing assets chapter on the topic.