How to Build a Content-Driven Static Site with Markdown, SvelteKit and Fusionable

Step-by-step tutorial on building a static website with SvelteKit and Fusionable. Explore setting up Markdown content, dynamic filtering, sorting, and displaying articles in a flexible, fast Svelte-based site.

Building a content-driven static website is easy with SvelteKit and Fusionable. With SvelteKit’s powerful framework and Fusionable’s flexible Markdown content querying, you can quickly set up a site that loads content from Markdown files and provides dynamic lists and filtering.

In this guide, we’ll cover the essentials:

• Setting up SvelteKit and Fusionable
• Creating Markdown-based content
• Using Fusionable to query and display content

So in this article we will use:

• SvelteKit as frontend framework
• Fusionable the library for querying, parsing, sorting, filtering, limiting the Markdown files
• Bun as JavaScript runtime, bundler, package manager. Let's dive in!

Set Up Your Project with SvelteKit and Fusionable

First, set up a new SvelteKit project and install Fusionable.

# Create a new SvelteKit project
bunx sv create my-static-site
cd my-static-site

# Add Fusionable
bun add fusionable

With Fusionable, you can efficiently load, filter, and sort Markdown content from your filesystem.

Create Content with Markdown

In your project, create a directory to store Markdown files. For example:

# Inside your project directory
mkdir -p src/content/posts

Inside src/content/posts, add Markdown files for each article. Here’s an example post:

# src/content/posts/my-first-post.md

---
title: "My First Post"
date: "2023-10-01"
slug: "my-first-post"
highlight: true
---

Welcome to my first blog post! This is a *simple* **Markdown** example.

Fusionable allows you to parse, load and filter the frontmatter metadata (title, date, etc.), which will make it easy to query and display your content.

Fusionable is an open source project, here you can find the public repository: https://github.com/Hi-Folks/fusionable

Load Content with Fusionable

Now, create a SvelteKit +page.server.js file to load content using Fusionable. Start by setting up a FusionCollection and loading posts from the src/content/posts directory:

// src/routes/+page.server.js
import FusionCollection from 'fusionable/FusionCollection';

export function load() {
  const collection = new FusionCollection()
    .loadFromDir('src/content/posts')
    .orderBy('date', 'desc');

  const posts = collection.getItemsArray();
  return { posts };
}

Here, we’re ordering posts by date in descending order and retrieving the list as an array. You’ll use this data in the src/routes/+page.svelte file.

// src/routes/+page.svelte
<script lang="ts">
  import type { PageData } from './$types';
  let { data }: { data: PageData } = $props();
</script>

<main>
  <h1>Blog Posts</h1>
  <ul>
    {#each data.posts as post}
      <li>
        <a href={`/posts/${post.fields.slug}`}>{post.fields.title}</a>
        <p>{post.fields.date}</p>
      </li>
    {/each}
  </ul>
</main>

This code iterates over posts and displays each post’s title and date with a link. The links will point to individual post pages.

Create Individual Post Pages

To display individual posts, set up a src/routes/posts/[slug]/+page.svelte page that renders each post based on its unique slug. Create a new file in src/routes/posts/[slug]/+page.server.js:

// src/routes/posts/[slug]/+page.server.js
import FusionCollection from 'fusionable/FusionCollection';

export function load({ params }) {
  const collection = new FusionCollection().loadFromDir('src/content/posts');
  const post = collection.getOneBySlug(params.slug);

  if (!post) {
    throw new Error('Post not found');
  }

  return { post: post.getItem() };
}

And then, create +page.svelte in src/routes/posts/[slug]:

// src/routes/posts/[slug]/+page.svelte
<script lang="ts">
  import type { PageData } from './$types';
  let { data }: { data: PageData } = $props();
</script>

<article>
  <h1>{data.post.fields.title}</h1>
  <p>{data.post.fields.date}</p>
  {@html data.post.content}
</article>

Now, each post’s page renders its title, date, and Markdown content.

Final Touch: Converting Markdown to HTML with Showdown

To make our content even more dynamic, let's convert the Markdown content in post.content into HTML using the Showdown library. This will allow us to display fully formatted Markdown as HTML on each post page.

Installing Showdown

If you're using Bun, you can install Showdown quickly with:

bun add showdown

Converting Markdown to HTML in +page.svelte

In src/routes/posts/[slug]/+page.svelte, import and use Showdown to process data.post.content before rendering it.

• First, import Showdown in your Svelte component.
• Then, convert the Markdown to HTML and use Svelte's {@html ...} directive to render it safely.

Here’s how it looks:

<script lang="ts">
  import type { PageData } from './$types';
  import Showdown from 'showdown';
  let { data }: { data: PageData } = $props();
  const converter = new Showdown.Converter();
  const postContentHTML = converter.makeHtml(data.post.content);
</script>

<article>
  <h1>{data.post.fields.title}</h1>
  <p>{data.post.fields.date}</p>
  {@html postContentHTML}
</article>

Wrapping Up

That’s it!
For running your local project you can execute:

bun dev --open

If you are interested into builing statically the website for deploying HTML static assets in production environment, you can take a look at this article: Building your static website with Svelte, SvelteKit and TailwindCSS. The section "Build statics pages (Static Site Generator)" explaing and demostrate how to use the static adapter for building quickly static pages.

You’ve now set up a basic website using SvelteKit and Fusionable, complete with Markdown-based content, custom filtering, and sorting. Fusionable provides powerful querying tools, making it easy to expand this setup with more filters (e.g., featured posts) or custom sort orders.

You’re now ready to customize and expand your site. Happy coding!

Remember to give a star ⭐ to the Open Source repository: https://github.com/Hi-Folks/fusionable, thank you!