Chris Burbridge's List: Static Website Generators

• You know you have a good idea when there are half a dozen implementations of it
• essentially the same but filled with subtle nuance
• “semi-static” website generator
• What is a semi-static website? Well it’s actually something like this blog. I spend ages writing and editing the articles but once I publish something I don’t generally change it unless it has factual errors
• my content doesn’t really benefit in anyway from being stored in a database or being generated dynamically on the fly because it is going to spend most of its life not being changed
• If you look at a lot of CMS systems the same is true. People want to be able to edit and reorganise material easily but they are rarely changing it more than once a week. The majority of the time the pages are static.
• If you look at a number of CMS or Wiki systems they are actually quite complicated. Before you can get going and generate your content (which remember is the core of what you want to do) you might have to setup a database and get the application deployed to a webserver.
• Almost all of them are Ruby projects and they have a certain similarity to the Rails concept of code generation
• . You will be issuing commands like “create page”, “build site” and so on.
• Nanoc is a very simple Gem and works with HTML and Erb by default, if you want to use a markup language or different templating language you will have to install the gem yourself
• Webby by comparison is a very noisy install, I think it may have its dependencies slightly wrong as it installs a version of rake, flexmock and rspec which are surely development dependencies rather than anything I as a user would need to use for the framework
• • Ignore Webby
• • Then nevermind Jeckyll
• Jekyll has a similarly demanding set of requirements but will install under JRuby. Jekyll did feel a lot like a personal solution as I was installing it. Textile is great but if I am going to be using Markdown why do I need to install RedCloth?
• Overall I liked the nanoc install experience most.
• Nanoc and Webby are very similar in that they use generators to create new elements in the site. Jekyll seems to use convention instead
• Nanoc is a general website creator but it does have a certain amount of opinion as to how to do that. For example it generates very nice clean website urls by putting each page in a directory by itself and then creating the page as an index.html page within that directory. Make sure you have your webserver configured appropriately.
• For what I wanted to do I initially felt that Nanoc was the best choice, it’s flexible, powerful and generates nice sites
• • I don't want a lot of conventions—the implementation has to be (a) easy to install (b) hard to mess up (c) easy to understand and use—quite obvious. Because I am introducing it into a legacy of maintainers other than me.
• However when I started to get to grips with Jekyll I was really amazed at how powerful the use of a few conventions were. Jekyll processes your site’s pages effectively in-place.

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• Historically, static sites were first and for some years they were the main way to create a site. Content Management Systems (CMS) appeared a couple of years later, mainly as an easier and faster way to have online presence. CMS were meant mainly for blogs but because of all their numerous advantages they soon overtook and began to be used for any kind of site.
• Despite all the nice things about CMS in the previous section, there is quite a lot of place for good old static HTML sites
• A static site is easier to maintain
• Do you need a database for your content
• Do you need more than a homepage, a simple Products/Services page(s), possibly a News page, and About Us/Contact?
• Do you plan to include lots of content in the future
• CMS on some sites is overkill
• There is another way: Gradually Growing Static CMS. Take model/structure aware site generators and add an editor like Aloha (http://aloha-editor.org/) built on top of a framework like Rails and you can start with simple static pages, gradually add interactive elements and even grow it into a full-featured, but easy to use CMS.

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• Jekyll is a popular static web framework written in Ruby by Tom Preston-Warner, the founder of Github. Jekyll uses a sensible set of configuration rules to generate static content. It supports layouts and different types of markup to generate into static html. From the github page it lists: RedCloth, Liquid, Classifier, Maruku, and Pygments all as dependencies. This seems to be the most popular static website generator.

    

  Jekyll works well right out of the box, and does not have a large learning curve to hit the ground running. It is a good system to start with if you are familar and just want to crank something out.
• The next ruby library I looked at was Stasis. Stasis features a number of features. It provides layouts and rendering so you can build your web page in blocks. It uses "Controllers" to pre-process code as well as support for self-written helpers in the code. It was nice to see that Stasis supports so many types of markups, thanks to the excellent tilt gem.
• The last ruby static website generator I looked at was Nanoc. Nanoc aims to not have be a framework that you step into and start right off the bat. The goal of this project is to create an excellent foundation for you to shape a static framework how you want. It supports a large number of markups, called "filters". It makes it easy to write additional filters, so adding support for a different markup is simple. You can even write custom filters for binary data. It also supports layouts and rendering if you want to use generic layouts for a blog or a portfolio. It includes helpers that make blogging easier. The site build revolves around its Rules file, which decides how items are routed and filtered before compilation. This allows you to run certain types of items through multiple filters, and change the way that certain items are compiled. For example static assets can be preprocessed by a minimizer and then outputted to a different directory. By default most items are outputted to a directory that is the same as the filename and renamed to index.html. This enables you to have beautiful URLs by default. It also comes with a few extra nice features that help with pre-deployment and deployment. It supports HTML and CSS validating. It also supports deploy configuartion with Rake.
• • Not even reading this fully, he also likes nanoc.
• • A third vote for nanoc!!
• I finally concluded I wanted to use Nanoc because it appears that it is the most flexible option

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• Things You Need To Consider
• Templating System
• Markup Language

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