Swifty Roadmap

Here's what's cooking in the Swifty kitchen. Some of these are half-baked ideas, others are ready to go. Got a feature request? We're all ears!

Recently Shipped

Safer CLI and Draft Preview Builds

Site creation now uses swifty new, unknown commands fail safely, help and version flags are available, and swifty build --drafts includes draft and future-dated content without enabling watcher behavior.

Template Page Collections

Templates receive immutable pages and collections.pages metadata arrays for recent-post lists, archives, and custom navigation without filesystem work.

Code-Aware Reading Time

Fenced code blocks no longer inflate page word counts or reading-time estimates.

Styled Starter Site

New projects include a minimal responsive stylesheet, default content layout, and starter JavaScript instead of empty presentation directories.

JavaScript Extension Hooks

An optional swifty.config.js can expose Eta globals and helpers or register Marked extensions without expanding Swifty's core configuration surface.

Bounded Search Index Entries

search_content_limit caps normalized leading page content at 5,000 characters per entry by default. Titles, summaries, tags, and URLs remain complete in their separate weighted fields.

Shared Template Computations

Nested partial rendering now reuses page data, Open Graph tags, word count, and reading-time computations while still merging late metadata for each render.

Self-Hosted Syntax Highlighting Themes

Highlighted code now uses a fingerprinted local highlight.js theme with no CDN or connection hints. highlight_theme selects any bundled theme, and code-free pages omit the stylesheet entirely.

Cached Navigation and Sibling Rendering

addLinks now caches resolved partials, rendered partial/page pairs, and complete ordered page sets for the duration of each build. Large sibling collections no longer repeat equivalent Eta work for every page, while distinct sibling output and ordering remain unchanged.

Table of Contents and Heading Anchors

Markdown headings now receive stable, unique IDs, and <%= toc %> renders an accessible nested outline. Generated and authored anchor links are validated by swifty check.

Opt-In Watcher Polling

Chokidar and LiveReload now use native filesystem events by default. A validated watcher_use_polling option enables polling for cloud folders, network mounts, containers, and other filesystems that require it.

Reusable Morpheus Navigation Core

Swifty's Idiomorph navigation and intent prefetching now live in a reusable, Node-import-safe Morpheus browser class. A small compatibility adapter keeps existing swifty:* events, data attributes, headers, history state, and globals working while the standalone npm package API is prepared.

Site Checker

swifty check catches duplicate routes, broken internal links, missing images, partials and layouts, invalid canonical URLs, and malformed configuration before deployment.

Stable Dates and Deterministic Ordering

Undated tracked pages now use their Git commit date, with mtime as the non-Git fallback. One transitive comparator handles positioned and dated pages at every level, including root navigation and position: 0.

Safer Single-Pass Content Rendering

Rendered page content and partials stay opaque during outer Eta rendering. Replacement tokens remain literal, and code examples are protected from Eta and image rewriting through the complete pipeline.

Client-Side Search Index

Swifty generates /search.json with clean page text, titles, summaries, tags, and base-path-aware URLs.

Related Content and Automatic Summaries

<%= summary %> now preserves authored summaries or derives them from an <!--more--> marker or the first useful paragraph. <%= related_pages %> ranks tag-related pages deterministically with a configurable limit.

Drop-In Search UI

<%= partial: search %> provides a self-hosted search interface with weighted results, keyboard navigation, accessible status updates, base-path support, and no external dependencies.

Incremental Page Rebuilds

During swifty start, safe body-only Markdown edits rebuild the changed page and derived search, feed, and SEO files. Metadata and structural changes clearly fall back to a full build.

Canonical Tag Routes

Tag identities now merge case and whitespace variants while preserving authored display labels. Generated routes use safe lowercase slugs, with deterministic hash suffixes preventing punctuation and Unicode slug collisions.

Section-Specific Sibling Links

Child pages retain their parent section filename, so folder partials such as partials/blog.md now consistently style child, sibling, and self-plus-sibling link lists.

Deterministic Dates and Scheduling

Display dates use validated date_locale and timezone settings with stable defaults. Calendar dates publish at midnight in that timezone, exact ISO timestamps retain their offset-defined instant, and sitemap/feed metadata stays machine-readable throughout the pipeline.

Valid Social Images and Clean RSS Excerpts

Relative Open Graph and Twitter images are emitted only with an absolute site_url; otherwise they are omitted and swifty check reports the source. RSS excerpts now come from normalized rendered content rather than raw Markdown.

Explicit Pagination Contract

The unused default_page_count setting is gone. Pagination remains disabled until page_count is explicitly configured at the site or folder level.

RSS Feeds

Auto-generate RSS/Atom feeds for blog sections. Configure in config.yaml and feeds are created automatically.

Draft Pages

Pages with draft: true in front matter are visible during development but hidden in production builds. Perfect for work-in-progress content.

Scheduled Publishing

Set a future date in front matter and the page stays hidden until that date arrives. Write content ahead of time and publish on schedule.

Full Tutorial

A complete step-by-step guide builds a bakery brochure site from scratch and introduces Swifty's core and approachable extension features.

Live Reload

Dev server now auto-refreshes your browser when you save changes. No more manual refreshing!

Incremental Builds

CSS, JS, and image changes now rebuild only what's needed. Full rebuilds only happen when pages, layouts, or partials change.

Pagination

For folders with lots of pages, automatically split index pages. Set page_count in config (globally or per-folder) and Swifty creates paginated pages with navigation links.

Eta Templating Engine

Full JavaScript support in templates using Eta with EJS-compatible syntax. Use conditionals, loops, and expressions directly in your templates with <% %> and <%= %>.

Data Files

Load JSON or YAML from a data/ folder and use in templates. File name becomes the variable: data/team.json → data.team. Great for team members, products, testimonials without creating full pages.

Open Graph & Twitter Cards

Add <%= og_tags %> to your template and Swifty generates all the meta tags for social sharing. Uses title, description, image, and tags from front matter.

Word Count & Reading Time

<%= word_count %> and <%= reading_time %> variables auto-calculated from page content. Perfect for blog posts showing "5 min read".

Previous/Next Navigation

<%= prev_page %> and <%= next_page %> auto-generate links to sibling pages in the same folder. Pages are linked based on their sort order (date or position). Perfect for blog series and multi-part tutorials.

Next Features

1. Standalone Morpheus Package

Move the extracted browser core into its own package, add browser-level navigation, history, prefetch, cancellation, focus, and fallback tests, and ship both side-effect-free ESM and an optional auto-start browser entry. Keep Swifty on the compatibility adapter while consumers migrate to morpheus:* events and data-morpheus-* controls.

Performance and Developer Experience

• Compute word count and reading time once from normalized rendered page content so rendered partial/data text is included where appropriate and code and template syntax are excluded consistently.
• Add content-hash-based incremental production builds so unchanged page output can be retained safely between swifty build runs.

Deferred

• Shortcodes: Eta and partials already cover most shortcode use cases.
• i18n routing: Valuable, but it adds routing and content-model complexity that needs a separate design before it fits Swifty's conventions.
• Image galleries: Revisit after the core blog and documentation workflows are complete.
• Multi-site library contexts: The programmatic API is intentionally one-site-per-process until module-level configuration, indexes, caches, and incremental state move behind an explicit site context.
• HTML parser migration: Keep the token-protected regex pipeline while its tests remain effective, but move rewriting and attribute inspection to a real HTML parser if valid edge cases begin escaping the current grammar.

Want Something?

If you've got ideas, bugs, or just want to say hi, open an issue on GitHub. Swifty is built by people who use it, and your feedback shapes what comes next.