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Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#61

Post by snowwrestler »

AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #16

You know what I've always wanted, but my searches have led me to believe that it (inexplicably) doesn't exist? I want a simple site generator. I don't want markdown, I don't want a fancy templating engine. I want some simple templating system that takes in normal HTML and generates pages from simple templates I define. I want to shove in some arbitrary HTML and have it spit out a site using some base templates. To th…

This is exactly what Dreamweaver templates do. You define the template files with editable areas, then you create individual pages based on the template files. When you change a template, Dreamweaver regenerates all the page files to reflect the change. It's all done in HTML with no weird compilers or parsers needed. SFTP the files into your public webroot and you're done.

This was one of the original "static site generators". And it's still used today, for example by the Smithsonian for some of their museum sites.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#62

Post by blaisco »

ohitsdom wrote: post #39

I'm still looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress (so with a UI, not markdown). Anyone know of something that fits the bill?

I was looking for the same thing, so I built it. It's a WordPress plugin that outputs a static copy of your site to a ZIP or a directory of your choice. The thought being that you put WordPress on a subdomain (e.g. wp.example.com) and have the main site (www.example.com) served by the static copy.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

It's still a work in progress (it launched a little over a month ago) but the feedback so far has been positive.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#63

Post by smt88 »

voyou wrote: post #53
ohitsdom wrote: post #39

I'm still looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress (so with a UI, not markdown). Anyone know of something that fits the bill?

If you're looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress, you could consider using Wordpress. Wordpress caching plugins can generate static HTML which then gets served to visitors directly by Apache or Nginx, without hitting PHP at all.

I believe WordPress is bundled with a plugin that does that, right?

I think the main problem is that it requires an extra step when you're running Apache (modifying .htaccess) to become truly static.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#64

Post by jeromeparadis »

voyou wrote: post #53
ohitsdom wrote: post #39

I'm still looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress (so with a UI, not markdown). Anyone know of something that fits the bill?

If you're looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress, you could consider using Wordpress. Wordpress caching plugins can generate static HTML which then gets served to visitors directly by Apache or Nginx, without hitting PHP at all.

What I'm looking for is a plugin that can make a entire Wordpress site static to freeze sites in time so they don't require Wordpress, PHP or MySQL.

Another workflow could be to use WordPress locally in a VM to edit, then generate a static site you upload through git or whatever to a bare minimum server.

Any plugin that fit the bill? I remember searching but never found something perfect.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#65

Post by kylerush »

ohitsdom wrote: post #39

I'm still looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress (so with a UI, not markdown). Anyone know of something that fits the bill?

You might want to look into CloudCannon (http://cloudcannon.com/). It's still an early product, but the idea is pretty cool. You auth CloudCannon to your Jekyll GitHub project and it exposes a Web GUI that allows content editors to do CRUD operations. CloudCannon then commits those changes directly to the repo. Then a GitHub webhook with something like Travis CI can build the site and deploy the changes.

This is great because it allows engineers to maintain a simple static website and content editors can use a web based GUI that is kind of like WordPress (though CloudCannon has a long way to go on the usability of its web GUI). We used CloudCannon at Hillary for America for a small project. It ended up not being the right tool for the job, but I definitely think there is a use case for CloudCannon and the team behind it is super open to feedback and iteration.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#66

Post by antimagic »

spjwebster wrote: post #28

Every time static generation rears its head, I'm reminded of Yahoo!'s ... unique... take. Back in 2006 when I worked for Yahoo!, and they had a CMS / template management system called Jake that statically generated templates for the PHP-based frontend servers to evaluate at request time. The idea was that you put as much of your logic as possible into the template generation layer, leaving the request-time logic to h…

Yup, sounds a bit like a project I did a while back - I had a C/C++ bindings generator that took an XML file and generated the C/C++ code to expose a C/C++ class to Javascript. So of course the logical thing for me to do was write the thing in Ruby.

That said, all code-generation tools - straight up generators, compilers, whatever - are a mindbending experience. Keeping track of whether a variable is available at generation time or runtime is trickier than I initially expected.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#68

Post by reustle »

ohitsdom wrote: post #39

I'm still looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress (so with a UI, not markdown). Anyone know of something that fits the bill?

I was toying with the idea of building an electron based UI frontend for Jekyll, where you'd start it up and point it at a jekyll project dir. It would essentially work like a stripped down cms admin running locally, and update your jekyll project files. Does something like this exist?

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#70

Post by notacoward »

blaisco wrote: post #62
ohitsdom wrote: post #39

I'm still looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress (so with a UI, not markdown). Anyone know of something that fits the bill?

I was looking for the same thing, so I built it. It's a WordPress plugin that outputs a static copy of your site to a ZIP or a directory of your choice. The thought being that you put WordPress on a subdomain (e.g. wp.example.com) and have the main site (www.example.com) served by the static copy. https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ It's still a work in progress (it launched a little over a month ago) but th…

I did something very much like this for a while. I'd use WordPress to create content on my laptop, then I'd crawl my own site using wget to collect the results and push those up to the real website. Turns out there are a few gotchas that simply-static didn't address, but I wrote a blog post about my experiences here.

http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/index.php/2013/04/using-wordpres...

The older posts on my site were all converted this way, though the newer ones are done directly in Pelican.

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