Yancy is a new content management plugin for the Mojolicious web framework. Yancy allows you to easily administrate your site’s content just by describing it using JSON Schema. Yancy supports multiple backends, so your site's content can be in Postgres, MySQL, and DBIx::Class.

For an demonstration application, let’s create a simple blog using Mojolicious::Lite. First we need to create a database schema for our blog posts. Let's use Mojo::Pg and its migrations feature to create a table called "blog" with fields for an ID, a title, a date, some markdown, and some HTML.

# myapp.pl
use Mojolicious::Lite;
use Mojo::Pg;

my $pg = Mojo::Pg->new( 'postgres://localhost/blog' );
$pg->migrations->from_data->migrate;

__DATA__
@@ migrations
-- 1 up
CREATE TABLE blog (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    title VARCHAR NOT NULL,
    created TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT NOW(),
    markdown TEXT NOT NULL,
    html TEXT NOT NULL
);
-- 1 down
DROP TABLE blog;

Next we add the Yancy plugin and tell it about our backend and data. Yancy deals with data as a set of collections which contain items. For a relational database like Postgres, a collection is a table, and an item is a row in that table.

Yancy uses a JSON schema to describe each item in a collection. For our blog collection, we have five fields:

1. id which is an auto-generated integer and should be read-only
2. title which is a free-form string which is required
3. created which is an ISO8601 date/time string, auto-generated
4. markdown which is a required Markdown-formatted string
5. html, a string which holds the rendered Markdown and is also required

Here's our configured Yancy blog collection:

plugin Yancy => {
    backend => 'pg://localhost/blog',
    collections => {
        blog => {
            required => [ 'title', 'markdown', 'html' ],
            properties => {
                id => {
                    type => 'integer',
                    readOnly => 1,
                },
                title => {
                    type => 'string',
                },
                created => {
                    type => 'string',
                    format => 'date-time',
                    readOnly => 1,
                },
                markdown => {
                    type => 'string',
                    format => 'markdown',
                    'x-html-field' => 'html',
                },
                html => {
                    type => 'string',
                },
            },
        },
    },
};

Yancy will build us a rich form for our collection from the field types we tell it. Some fields, like the markdown field, take additional configuration: x-html-field tells the Markdown field where to save the rendered HTML. There's plenty of customization options in the Yancy configuration documentation.

Now we can start up our app and go to http://127.0.0.1:3000/yancy to manage our site's content:

$ perl myapp.pl daemon
Server available at http://127.0.0.1:3000

Finally, we need some way to display our blog posts. Yancy provides helpers to access our data. Let's use the list helper to display a list of blog posts. This helper takes a collection name and gives us a list of items in that collection. It also allows us to search for items and order them to our liking. Since we've got a blog, we will order by the creation date, descending.

get '/' => sub {
    my ( $c ) = @_;
    return $c->render(
        'index',
        posts => [ $c->yancy->list(
            'blog', {}, { order_by => { -desc => 'created' } },
        ) ],
    );
};

Now we just need an HTML template to go with our route! Here, I use the standard Bootstrap 4 starter template and add this short loop to render our blog posts:

<main role="main" class="container">
% for my $post ( @{ stash 'posts' } ) {
    <%== $post->{html} %>
% }
</main>

Now we have our completed application and we can test to see our blog post:

$ perl myapp.pl daemon
Server available at http://127.0.0.1:3000

Yancy provides a rapid way to get started building a Mojolicious application (above Mojolicious’s already rapid development). Yancy provides a basic level of content management so site developers can focus on what makes their site unique.