PocoCMS Frequently Asked Questions

What is PocoCMS?
PocoCMS is the fastest way to turn your words into full-featured information website with optional header, footer, navbar and sidebar. It's a static site generator that converts Markdown into HTML using themes. There's only one file to install. There are no configuration files. You don't even have to know Markdown to create a full site. It has full tutorial and reference documentation packed with examples. You can build an entire website starting with a single Markdown file named index.md.

To create a complete website, drop to your operating system's command prompt and type:

poco -new mysite

The response:

Site published to /Users/html/mysite/WWW/index.html

Edit the file index.md it created. Go from this:

---
title: "🧞 Powered by PocoCMS"
---
# Welcome to mysite

hello, world.

Learn more at [PocoCMS tutorials](https://pococms.com/docs/tutorials.html)

To this, by adding the theme: informer line as shown:

---
theme: informer
---
# Welcome to mysite

hello, world.

Learn more at [PocoCMS tutorials](https://pococms.com/docs/tutorials.html)

Build the site by running poco at the command line:

poco

The result is a full page with optional header, navbar, sidebar, and footer:

Default Informer theme screenshot

This theme was built using the PocoCMS theme framework and it has among its built-in features:

Why does my website look like plain HTML all of a sudden?
This is probably because an error in your front matter. For example, perhaps you wanted to hide the nav and did it like this:
---
hide nav
---

The problem is that hide needs a colon after it, like this:

---
hide: nav
---
What's the difference between a theme and a pagetheme?
You customize the look of PocoCMS sites with themes. You can do it on each page in the front matter, like this:
Filename: weather.md
---
pagetheme: informer
---
# Weather

Today's weather outloook is etc.

But what if you just want an overall look and don't want to be putting pagethemes on every page? You go to the home page and use the theme declaration:

Filename: index.md on the home page
---
theme: informer
---

Now you can forget about pagetheme except when you choose to override the theme for a particular page.

How do I get blank lines after paragraphs?
Method 1: End the line with a single backslash character like this: \. Don't forget the last line doesn't need the backslash.
Line 1.\
Line 2.\
Line 3.

Method 2: To get end a line and start a new one, you can end the first line with two spaces. Imagine the little dot characters ·· are actually you pressing the space key twice:

Line 1.··   ← Pretend those are 2 space characters
Line 2.

What? Why? This is terrible!

It's actually the way HTML behaves, and remember that Markdown was made to be easy to read by itself, but to translate directly to HTML when you did a conversion.

Some background on HTML and how it works with Markdown

And in HTML, any number of spaces and/or paragraphs (called newlines in the programming world) between words are automatically replaced by a single space. So, if you write any of these in Markdown:

Line 1.
Line 2.

Or this:

Line 1.


Line 2.

Or even this:

Line 1.



Line 2.

The result will always be this:

Line 1. Line 2.

In HTML, if you write this:

<p>Line 1.<br/ >Line 1.</p>

you will get the result you're looking for:

Line 1. 
Line 2.

There may or may not be a space between paragraphs depending on how the style sheet was written.

You will get that same result if your code looks like this:

<p>Line 1.</p>



<p>Line 1.</p>

It will still appear this way on the web page:

Line 1. 

Line 2.

Adding 2 spaces to the end of a line is how to get Markdown to enclose each line in paragraph tags, but to use a line break between them. Again, if you type 2 spaces at the end of the first line, both will be rendered in HTML as paragraphs. This Markdown:

Line 1.··   ← Pretend those are 2 space characters
Line 2.

Becomes this HTML:

<p>Line 1.<br/ >Line 2.</p>

And will render something like this:

Line 1. 
Line 2.