Persona supports [@cite] through a Pandoc preprocessing pipeline. This post is the working example for authoring and building citation-enabled content (Zola themes).

Prerequisites

Install Pandoc and watchexec:

# macOS
brew install pandoc watchexec

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt install pandoc
cargo install watchexec-cli

File structure

Keep these files in the same folder:

• index.src.md (authoring source)
• references.bib (BibTeX database)
• index.md (generated output, do not edit manually)

Write citations in .src.md

Use Pandoc citation syntax in Markdown:

Climate change is accelerating[@ipcc2021].
Multiple studies confirm this[@ipcc2021; @nasa2023].

Set optional citation config in frontmatter under [extra]:

• citation_style = "apa"
• bibliography = "references.bib"

Build and serve

• Generate *.md from all *.src.md files:

  bash scripts/build.sh

• Live rebuild + local server:

  # In one terminal, watch for changes and rebuild:
  bash scripts/watch.sh

  # In a separate terminal, serve with Zola:
  zola serve

Citation style resolution order

Priority from highest to lowest:

1. Post frontmatter: [extra] citation_style = "..."
2. Site-level config.toml [extra.persona].citation_style
3. Theme config themes/persona/config.toml [extra.persona].citation_style

Bundled styles in citation-style/: ieee, apa. Custom styles can be added by placing .csl files in citation-style/ and referencing them in frontmatter.

Output and styling

The pipeline emits HTML citations and bibliography blocks so SCSS can style stable classes:

• .citation
• .references
• .csl-entry
• .csl-left-margin
• .csl-right-inline

Inline citations anchor to bibliography entries, and the bibliography heading is rendered inside the refs container as “Bibliography”.