Custom Partials

[wycats]

My mdbooks frequently have custom themes that would benefit from further decomposition than the builtin set of supported partials.

I would be interested in a facility that allowed the definition of custom partials in a theme. Does that make sense?

[ehuss]

Hi @wycats! Perhaps an example would help illuminate how it could work? I'm only vaguely familiar with handlebars partials (and mostly from a sense that they can be awkward to set up).

[wycats]

@ehuss sorry for the very delayed reply!

What I was hoping for is something like:

• you can put more hbs files in theme/
• you refer to those partials as {{> name}}

So for example, if you have theme/sidebar-logo.hbs, you could then say {{> sidebar-logo}} in other hbs files.

One way to accomplish this would be to glob the theme directory for **/*.hbs and then register them here: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/blob/master/src/renderer/html_handlebars/hbs_renderer.rs#L511.

If it feels too expensive to look in the entire theme directory, another option would be to allow partials to be stored in partials/**/*.hbs (and their name would be the relative path from theme/partials), which would be a reliable signal that the user wants them to be used in this way.