Writing

Once your folder is a site, writing is the work: shaping each page and how pages connect. This section covers everything you do in your Markdown.

Control each page with frontmatter — title, date, visibility, and more. See how files, folders, and URLs fit together. Connect pages with wikilinks and embeds, shape the site's navigation and footer, call out content with callouts, and add layouts with shortcodes — grids, galleries, hero images. Your media is tidied for the web for you, and a site can be Multilingual sites. Write in the built-in editor or any Markdown editor you like.

Choosing the right primitive#

When a page needs a specific visual treatment, try in this order:

1. Plain markdown + CSS selector. Use ## Mission, > quote, *byline*, - item. Let the theme select the resulting HTML. Zero new vocabulary.
2. A moss-native shortcode. :::grid N, ::::buttons, :::hero, :::gallery, > [!pending]. These emit well-known class names that the default theme already styles. See shortcodes.
3. Named-class fenced div. ::: {.class} attaches a CSS class to a region without introducing a new shortcode. Pair with a CSS rule in .moss/theme/style.css. See shortcodes#Named-class fenced divs.
4. Custom shortcode. Rare; only when you need new behavior the parser doesn't already support.

Special cases#

Markdown attributes that do NOT work#

These Pandoc-style attribute syntaxes are not supported by moss:

• # Title {.class}: heading attributes
• paragraph\n{.class}: paragraph attributes
• ---\n{.section-divider}: hr attributes

Use ::: {.class} fenced divs or CSS element selectors instead.