Support for arbitrary templates / more documentation on the template yaml parameter

[peekxc]

Description

Context: I'm trying to use Quarto + Eleventy to generate a custom site that uses eleventy layouts. Eleventy is a nice static-site generator in part because it supports virtually any template language (ejs, pug, etc.)

Quarto seems to have limited support for HTML templates in the form of custom listings (why this limited to listings only is unclear). For this particular project, I like the idea of using quarto in the way described by the docusauraus (or hugo) workflow: use quarto to render computational documents to markdown documents, and then use 11ty to generate the site from there.

So the workflow looks like this, for example:

---
title: News.qmd
format: 
  gfm:
    variant: +yaml_metadata_block
template: single_md.pug
---
# News 
...

=> quarto render =>

---
title: News.md
template: single_md.pug
---
# News 
...

=> eleventy => news.html

However, when I try to use quarto (+a fix for keep-yaml) to render GFM files, it complains that it could not find the data file corresponding to my template. I don't necessarily want quarto to use that yaml parameter as I want to use that yaml parameter to render the template via eleventy.

I'm left with the following options:

• Ask quarto support devs to add an eleventy-like markdown format (as is supported for hugo and docusaurus now)
• Omit the template yaml parameters for *.qmd documents and post-process the generated *.md documents
• Figure out how to get quarto to ignore the yaml template parameter

I'm actually not sure what path would be the recommended way to go. Any suggestions?

[mcanouil]

Would you mind sharing some Git repository or something to work on / help you on?

Ask quarto support devs to add an eleventy-like markdown format (as is supported for hugo and docusaurus now)

Quarto extension mechanism is here for this, see https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/.