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Soupault: A static website management tool

soupault.app

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Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#31

Post by j-a-a-p »

njrc9 wrote: post #20
Brajeshwar wrote: post #3

Honestly, I could not get to a point of clarity on What does this exactly do. I went through the website's landing page and looks pretty rock solid. But this seems to be trying to do too many things in a pretty complex way for a small and simple output. I want to like this, and I think this can help me with some of my mundane chores and focus on the content but I just cannot quite grasp it. Can someone, please, do a…

It was a little difficult to wrap my head around at first, but for me its main benefit is this: In many static site generators, if there is a page in a collection of pages (say, a product page) that you want to add a custom layout to (but without affecting other pages in that collection), you often need to create a separate template, or modify the default template to allow for this exception. With Soupault, page cont…

> Edit: Another benefit is that Soupault is a single statically-linked executable with no dependencies, and therefore can be downloaded via a simple link.

My single executable is called 'docker' for these kind of tools. No need to download anything at all.

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#32

Post by panphora »

I was hopelessly confused about what Soupault actually does, so I took time to understand it piece by piece and summarize it here:

1. HTML Manipulation: Unlike most SSGs that primarily generate HTML from templates and markdown, Soupault allows direct manipulation of HTML content, treating HTML as a mutable object rather than a final output.

2. External Tools Integration: Soupault automates the use of external tools for content processing and HTML modifications at build time, facilitating an array of content transformations directly on the HTML.

3. Metadata Handling: Soupault extracts metadata directly from HTML using CSS selectors, avoiding the need for front matter and offering more flexibility in content structure and metadata management.

TLDR: Basically, Soupault is a static site generator that allows for direct HTML manipulation of your sites by treating HTML as the source of truth instead of the final output.

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#34

Post by dmbaturin »

wonger_ wrote: post #5
Brajeshwar wrote: post #3

Honestly, I could not get to a point of clarity on What does this exactly do. I went through the website's landing page and looks pretty rock solid. But this seems to be trying to do too many things in a pretty complex way for a small and simple output. I want to like this, and I think this can help me with some of my mundane chores and focus on the content but I just cannot quite grasp it. Can someone, please, do a…

I agree that the advantages are not clear. Maybe this table of comparisons should go on the landing page: https://soupault.app/tips-and-tricks/comparison/ Most SSGs force a blog-oriented directory structure like assets/ static/ theme/ posts/ public/. But soupault only needs an input/ and output/. Most SSGs convert markdown to HTML. But soupault is good at processing (or ignoring) any sort of source content, which is…

I was wondering if that part should have been the main page slogan: "Soupault’s DOM manipulation is as powerful as client-side JavaScript (without interactivity, of course), but the result is a static page."

>Maybe this table of comparisons should go on the landing page

The elephant in the room is that none of the popular tools' websites make any sense to people who aren't already familiar with that class of tools. I happened to accidentally come up with a tool that's too unlike anything else to be easy to explain by "it's like {alreadyPopularTool} but with {importantDifference}".

I also hope that people from the Web 1.0 revivalist circles who hate typical SSGs for their hostility to handwritten HTML on board, although that development was ironic: the reason I included the HTML post-processor mode was to help those folks inject consistent navigation into otherwise handwritten pages or similar — in reality they just told me they were _proud_ of wasting their time on that completely automatable task, but the post-processor mode was a surprise hit with people who wanted to fix up outputs of inflexible HTML generators.

The comparison table is not very helpful for people who might not have seen an SSG before, placing it on the main page might create a confrontational tone (because it's focused on things that soupault made possible compared to other tools), and I'd have to constantly watch those projects to see if anything is no longer true.

For example, it would be pretty easy to allow Hugo call AsciiDoc and other external processes with custom CLI options — I'm sure someone will eventually do it and it will be a big improvement for those who want to use Hugo.

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#35

Post by dmbaturin »

dflock wrote: post #27
dmje wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gunna be honest: I'm in this court ("why?" "what problem does this solve?") with, well, the whole SSG thing. I get why people want to write their content in Markdown (well, specifically, I get why tech people want to write their content in Markdown, but not normal humans who almost always want a WYSIWYG) - but what I just can't get my head around is the vast complexity that almost all these tools seem to bring to…

The tools (mostly) all start out simple, as you described. Then they start to get traction and users. More users equals more diverse use cases and feature requests. Each individual request makes sense, for that group of users, and is implemented. Slowly the software grows in complexity, until you have Hugo etc... Then people say it's too complex and start over - and it all happens again. This applies to all software…

Delegating the complexity to the user was my biggest motivation behind many features of soupault.

Hugo has two different Markdown libraries baked in and you have to choose them, and it also had hardcoded commands to call rST and AsciiDoc processors. If you are migrating from a different SSG, Markdown processors behavior differences can bite you and there's no way out.

With soupault, you just configure a command to convert a file with a certain extension to HTML, and all features (ToC, footnotes, anything provided by plugins...) work the same because they they are implemented by manipulating the parsed HTML element tree.

Want a CSS preprocessor? You can pipe tag contents through any external program if you feel like it. Want to re-compress or manipulate images? You can write a Lua script that gets their paths from and tags and calls an external program on their files. And so on.

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#36

Post by njrc9 »

dmbaturin wrote: post #35
dflock wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools (mostly) all start out simple, as you described. Then they start to get traction and users. More users equals more diverse use cases and feature requests. Each individual request makes sense, for that group of users, and is implemented. Slowly the software grows in complexity, until you have Hugo etc... Then people say it's too complex and start over - and it all happens again. This applies to all software…

Delegating the complexity to the user was my biggest motivation behind many features of soupault. Hugo has two different Markdown libraries baked in and you have to choose them, and it also had hardcoded commands to call rST and AsciiDoc processors. If you are migrating from a different SSG, Markdown processors behavior differences can bite you and there's no way out. With soupault, you just configure a command to co…

Happy user of Soupault here. What you described here:

> Markdown processors behavior differences can bite you and there's no way out.

is under appreciated. The lack of “surprises” in Soupault is very appreciated.

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#37

Post by mbirth »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #6

This may sound counter intuitive, but I am befuddled with all these static site generators always CLI. Yet, I delight in static sites . Why is are all static site generators (that I am aware of) are CLI? What prevent simplistic drag and drop GUI/WYSIWYG that generates those clean static files? All the static generators I have tested are way over-complicated for the "general public", yet I think static sites are proba…

For Mac or iPad/iPhone, there’s e.g. blocs - https://blocsapp.com/

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#38

Post by lurn_mor »

mikae1 wrote: post #16
getwiththeprog wrote: post #4

While I write HTML by hand, and see no need for soupault, the chance to raise awareness for pataphysics is rather tempting...

Do you write RSS feeds by hand too?

Actually, I do. Why would I do it differently than the HTML I just authored?

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#39

Post by WhyNotHugo »

_xivi wrote: post #8
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #6

This may sound counter intuitive, but I am befuddled with all these static site generators always CLI. Yet, I delight in static sites . Why is are all static site generators (that I am aware of) are CLI? What prevent simplistic drag and drop GUI/WYSIWYG that generates those clean static files? All the static generators I have tested are way over-complicated for the "general public", yet I think static sites are proba…

> Why is are all static site generators (that I am aware of) are CLI? What prevent simplistic drag and drop GUI/WYSIWYG that generates those clean static files? Check: - Tina CMS: https://tina.io/ - Primo CMS: https://primocms.org/ More generally, try looking for `git-based cms` or `CMS+SSG`, you'll find a diverse set of solutions. Anyway, you had it in reverse. Static generation is the easy part, while what you're l…

Ironically, the first link has setup instructions which use the cli:

    npx create-tina-app@latest
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