PoshWyam

Over on the Wyam Gitter Jamie Phillips (@phillipsj) made a casual remark about using my PowerShell script I use in this blog's source for creating new blog posts, and how he was trying to modify it for draft usage. That blossomed into a whole new project under the Wyamio organization called PoshWyam that I've been hacking at for a few days now. It's in preliminary (read “alpha”, not even "beta") state right now, but it is ready enough for people to use and provide feedback. Once we are ready this will go up on PowerShell Gallery, but until then if you want to use it you'll need to clone the repo.

Here's a whirlwind tour for usage, prior to release.

import-module PoshWyam\PoshWyam.psd1

You need to import the module from the location in which you cloned the repo (alternatively, you could copy the PoshWyam directory from the repo into your PowerShell module path somewhere).

Get-Command -Module PoshWyam

View all of the fabulous commands exported by this new module.

Get-Help New-blog

View the help for any of these new commands. Keep in mind that we're alpha at best here. I know I'm missing example documentation for all the commands, for instance. That said, every command is documented. If you find anything missing or confusing provide feedback, please.

New-Blog "My Blog" http://www.myblog.com

Create a new blog. Note that the example above is the minimal syntax for doing so. There's other parameters you can supply, all documented with Get-Help. This new blog includes a Cake build script, so you're ready to go right out of the box, no installation of any tools necessary. The Cake bootstrapper, build.ps1 installs it locally to this project and the wyam.cake script will install Wyam locally.

Invoke-Wyam

If you have some need to run wyam.exe you can use the Invoke-Wyam cmdlet to do so. This bootstraps the local installation of Wyam if it's not yet been done and then invokes it with the arguments you pass.

New-BlogPost "My Second Post" Tag1,Tag2

This creates a new blog post with the specified Title and Tags. You can use the -Draft switch to specify the creation of a draft post instead. You can also get creative and pipe this command to Invoke-Item to open the markdown file in the associated editor on your system, just to go crazy with it.

Get-BlogPost

This gets all the blog posts, sorted by the Published date.

Get-BlogPost *Second*

You can supply a -Title parameter, including wild cards, to limit the search to just those posts that match.

Get-BlogPost *Second* | Get-Content

The output objects for Get-BlogPost are designed specifically for piping to other PowerShell cmdlets that take a -Path parameter by property name. This means most of the cmdlets you'd want to use it with will “just work” as you expect. Don't be fooled by the default output of this command. We use a type formatting file to make the output from Get-BlogPost look nice and clean, but there are properties, specifically a Path property, that are present but not displayed by default.

Publish-BlogDraft Title

Doesn't do you much good to create draft posts if you can't easily publish them later. Do note that currently Wyam doesn't understand the concept of drafts, so the drafts created here cannot be viewed even by using the preview server until they are published. This is a feature that Dave Glick (@daveaglick) might add to Wyam in the future.

Those are the main commands, at least as of right now. Have other command ideas you'd like to see? Found a bug? Want to participate in the development? Let us know on GitHub or Gitter.