In this guide we are going to learn about using custom components in markdown posts.

You can change elements in your markdown posts by using custom renderers in the Content component. These renderers are React components that will replace the original element.

Styling HTML Elements

The very first idea for allowing custom renderers is to allow developers to change elements. We can create a custom component to replace for instance p or h2 elements.

If you choose to use a CSS-in-JS library such as Styled Components or emotion, you can define styled components.

--- title: Styled HTML page: page --- This is a paragraph. Hello there! --- ## This is a title And yet another paragraph.

The page.js file to render the post will look something like this:

import React from 'react' import withPost , { Content } from 'nextein/post' export default withPost ( ( { post } ) => { const { data : { title } } = post return ( < div > < h1 > { title } < / h1 > < Content { ... post } / > < / div > ) } )

This will render a very simple html without any styles.

Let's change our page.js to display the paragraphs with some styles. We are going to use a simple stylesheet (as it is defined in the nextein-starter kit).

We need to add our stylesheet.css to the page.js component using next.js Head or by creating a pages/_document.js .

< Head > < link type = "text/css" rel = "stylesheet" href = "/static/stylesheet.css" / > < / Head >

We will need to create a Paragraph component that will replace the p tags. Usually you'd place those in the components folder (but it's up to you)

import React from 'react' export default ( { children , ... props } ) => ( < p className = "awesome-paragraph" { ... props } > { children } < / p > )

We have defined a p tag that adds a className with a css class. Let's add the definition into our stylesheet.css file:

.awesome-paragraph { margin : 8 px ; padding : 16 px ; background-color : #e4e4e4 ; border : 1 px solid #f63 ; }

And then we can define our custom renderer for p tags in the Content component.

import React from 'react' import Head from 'next/head' import withPost , { Content } from 'nextein/post' import Paragraph from '../components/Paragraph' export default withPost ( ( { post } ) => { const { data : { title } } = post return ( < div > < h1 > { title } < / h1 > < Content { ... post } renderers = { { p : Paragraph } } / > < / div > ) } )

The final result will render paragraphs with our style

Custom Elements

In a similar way we can use the renderers to define custom components. We can create a new tag in our markdown to display an image with a caption. If we use the img element ( ![alt text](image url) ) we will end up with an img wrapped into a p element. In our case we are going to use a custom html element x-image .

--- title: Styled HTML page: page --- This is a paragraph. Hello there! < x-image src = " https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1493680772813-f6ffe1e96087 " caption = " Courtesy of unsplash.com " > </ x-image > --- ## This is a title And yet another paragraph.

And this will be our Custom Image Component ( components/Images.js ).

import React from 'react' export default ( { src , caption } ) => ( < div > < img className = "image-img" src = { src } / > < span className = "image-caption" > { caption } < / span > < / div > )

Again, we need to update the stylesheet.css and add these:

.image-img { display : block ; margin : auto ; max-width : 100 % ; height : auto ; box-shadow : 0 0 4 px rgba ( 0 , 0 , 0 , .16 ) ; } .image-caption { display : inline-block ; width : 100 % ; font-size : .65 em ; font-style : italic ; text-align : center ; }

Finally, we add our Image to render x-image elements in the Content component.

import withPost , { Content } from 'nextein/post' import Image from '../components/Image' import Paragraph from '../components/Paragraph' export default withPost ( ( { post } ) => { const { data } = post return ( < div > < h1 > { data . title } < / h1 > < Content { ... post } renderers = { { p : Paragraph , 'x-image' : Image } } / > < / div > ) } )