I started using git submodules to make a standalone Rmarkdown project as part of my blogdown site: http://blog.oilgainsanalytics.com/. Thanks to @tmastny tmastny for the eye opener. The solution is great because (1) it allows me using data and R scripts from the main blogdown publication platform; (2) publish the submodule as a standalone project by itself in Zenodo, with its own README.Rmd and other .Rmd notebooks; (3) develop, test, generate HTMLs and PDFs, and run the analysis without adding overhead to blogdown.
The only inconvenient I am facing is that the standalone analysis project (submodule) - living under content/publications/external/volve-reservoir-model-evolution-, is that the .Rmd notebooks in the submodule project are also built when I serve the blogdown site.
I have used @yihui new option options(blogdown.draft.output = TRUE) placing it in .Rprofile, setting the notebooks in the submodule frontmatter with draft:true, but still blogdown is rendering them. I have also used the parameter ignoreFiles which is immune to the purpose as well.
Have any of you found a way to prevent rendering .Rmd files that reside under any of the content subfolders?
blogdown source: https://github.com/AlfonsoRReyes/fonzie-oilgains
standalone submodule: https://github.com/f0nzie/volve-reservoir-model-evolution
Related post: What's your blogdown workflow to include work from other projects