Statiq Web has a variety of ways of reading, writing, and working with different kinds of files.

There are three broad categories of files in Statiq Web:

• Assets which are either copied to the output folder directly or transformed during copying. Examples include images, standalone JavaScript, CSS stylesheets, and Less or Sass files.
• Content which typically output as HTML files, directly or after one or more templates are applied. Examples include Markdown, Razor, and HTML files.
• Data which may or may not be output and can be used when applying a template to content files. Examples include JSON, YAML, and XML files.

Files should be placed in the input folder (or a sub-folder) and the InputFiles setting controls what files from the input folder are loaded. It's set to **/{!_,}* by default which loads all files in any input directory unless it starts with an underscore _. You can always redefine the InputFiles setting to whatever globbing pattern(s) you want, but if you just need to include explicit files that would otherwise be excluded (I.e. ones that start with an underscore), you can use the AdditionalIntputFiles setting to do so.

The category of a file, and thus what operations are performed on it, is determined by its media type (which is inferred from its file extension). Unless the file extension is recognized as a content or data file such as Markdown, Razor, JSON, or YAML, the file is considered an asset file. The category can be changed by setting ContentType for the document. For example, you can treat a JSON file which would normally be interpreted as a data file and processed as JSON as an asset file that should be copied to the output folder directly by setting ContentType to Asset via something like a sidecar file.

Within a given category, the media type of a file determines what templates and other processing will be performed on the file. The media type is typically determined by file extension, but you can also change the media type of a file by changing the MediaType setting. This can often be useful in combination with the ContentType setting. For example, if you have a JSON file that you want to treat as data but it has a .css extension for some reason, set ContentType to Data and MediaType to application/json. This will treat the file as if it had a .json extension in the first place.

You can also change the ContentType and MediaType for entire directories using directory metadata. For example, if your input folder contains a subfolder like node_modules that you want to copy wholesale to the output folder, but some of the files contained within the node_modules folder would be processed by either asset, content, or data templates, you can essentially treat every file as if it were a text file to be copied directly to the output folder by creating a _directory.yaml file inside your node_modules folder with the following content:

ContentType: Asset
MediaType: text/plain

Note that to avoid reading every single file and parsing them for front matter, only existing content file types can use front matter to initially change their ContentType or MediaType values. Other file types need to use directory metadata or sidecar files to set their media type to something other than their extension.

Both content files and data files support functionality like directory metadata files, sidecar files, and front matter. The main difference is that templates like Markdown and Razor are processed for content files whereas data files are parsed as data formats like JSON and YAML and add to the metadata of a document.

Features like archives and feeds also let you work with content and data and produce different kinds of outputs from them.