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Static Site Generators

staticsitegenerators.net

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Re: Static Site Generators

#41

Post by tonyedgecombe »

slacka wrote: post #20

My 60 yr old mother runs 2 small nonprofits, and is responsible for the web content and design. She's a pro with Word Perfect, but gets confused by simple HTML tags, and no interest, time, or aptitude to learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Last weekend, she asked for help with her website, and I was shocked to find out they still look like they're out of the late 90's. She does all of her editing with a 2006 copy of dreamweav…

I always liked Spolsky's CityDesk for this scenario, sadly it has been abandoned for a long time now.

Re: Static Site Generators

#44

Post by anu_gupta »

hpaavola wrote: post #19

Is ther any CMS/blog/... type of thing that would create flat files, but keep all the content also in DB? That way search and comments (and especially moderation for comments) would be easier to handle, but still it would be easy on the server. For my own site I created something like this, https://github.com/Harri/Spage , but instead of DB, I used another set of flat files (serialized arrays containing the page cont…

Movable Type does this.

Re: Static Site Generators

#45

Post by mikeleeorg »

__david__ wrote: post #6

Static site generators seem like music databases, in that everyone eventually writes their own crappy one that just barely scratches the itch they had (and I'm no exception).

Now that you mention it, building a static site generator would make a great learning exercise for a new programmer. Since they are a fairly common personal project, there are a lot of examples from which to examine.

Re: Static Site Generators

#46

Post by athesyn »

__david__ wrote: post #6

Static site generators seem like music databases, in that everyone eventually writes their own crappy one that just barely scratches the itch they had (and I'm no exception).

I made one last weekend with nodejs and express, at least it's a good exercise for stretching your muscles in a new programming language.

Re: Static Site Generators

#49

Post by mercer »

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #47

I've been wondering, with so many static site generators, isn't there one geared toward the "brochureware" market? I'm thinking of something that is very easy to use and maybe imposes rigid assumptions for non-technical people.

Could you share more details as to what kind of assumptions you'd expect?

I suppose it wouldn't be to hard to use any of the existing static site generators and either 'repackage' them with specific assumptions, or write a module that implements them...

Re: Static Site Generators

#50

Post by mercer »

mikeleeorg wrote: post #45
__david__ wrote: post #6

Static site generators seem like music databases, in that everyone eventually writes their own crappy one that just barely scratches the itch they had (and I'm no exception).

Now that you mention it, building a static site generator would make a great learning exercise for a new programmer. Since they are a fairly common personal project, there are a lot of examples from which to examine.

Indeed! While I learned a lot from Rails' because of how it prescribes a certain structure and approach, the size of it all and the 'magic' that hid a lot of (important) detail was probably suboptimal.

Now I'd been building websites for a while, so I'd already gone organically through the whole 'hey let's use php to cut my pages up into reusable modules', 'I can automate this thing here', 'plugins are awesome!', and 'hey what's this MVC thing'.

But for people starting from less, a static site generator might be more explicit and less complex to learn with.

The mere fact that there's often a 'build' step that converts your stuff to plain html, javascript and css, I find, makes beginners feel like they understand things a little better.

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