Niko­la is a stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, and it knows its au­di­ence: Nerd­s, pro­gram­mer­s, sci­ence peo­ple, and the like. Oh, and me. I most­ly de­vel­op it for me.

One im­por­tant thing for this cat­e­go­ry of tools is that they should cater to what the users want to do, and al­so to how they want to do it.

So, faced with the need to do things like "set this spe­cif­ic meta­da­ta field in these 490 posts out of the 1450 you have" ... edit­ing them man­u­al­ly is not go­ing to hap­pen.

Sure, I could sed/python/what­ev­er my way to do it "au­to­mat­i­cal­ly". But that is go­ing to be aw­ful­ly er­ror prone.

So, I have start­ed a cam­paign to fix it. I want to make Niko­la be the API to its da­ta. This has two sides.

I need to be able to run one-off things

This needs to be easier than creating a Nikola command plugin but less annoying than typing them in nikola console

[ralsina@salma static]$ nikola console
Scanning posts..........done!
Python 3.8.2 (default, Feb 26 2020, 22:21:03) 
Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
IPython 7.11.1 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.


Nikola v8.0.4 -- IPython Console (conf = configuration file, site, nikola_site = site engine, commands = nikola commands)

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The good news is: this is done in git mas­ter!

Now you can create a python script and run it as nikola console -s cool_script.py and the script runs in the same context as the console, so you magically have the site itself and the timeline and the configuration and all the good stuff ready to use.

I need the API to be useful

And this is where Niko­la has ... not been a good boy. Since it was meant to gen­er­ate stat­ic sites, it's pret­ty good about of­fer­ing you ways to know things about your da­ta.

Want to know what is the de­scrip­tion of the tags ap­plied to the post in slovene? it to­tal­ly can do that in two lines.

Want to add a tag to a post? Sor­ry dude, that's im­pos­si­ble.

So, I am adding these things, slow­ly.

And that's the cur­rent sta­tus.