I host a number of websites which are mostly static in nature, these are often hand-crafted, but three of them us a slightly hacked up creation of my own.
Given a master "template" the file foo.skx gets massaged into foo.html.
Sadly I added features randomly, and now I have three template-driven sites which are handled slightly differently. This put me in the position of having to choose between two options:
- Unify my template-handling.
- Use something else.
Simplifying my life is good. So I examined a list of static site generators, and a few more found by searching github.
Other than doing clever things by knowing which page is "current" I needed to do only minimal magic:
- Conditionally include files.
- Setup per-page CSS files.
- Setup per-page templates.
Webgen looked like a good fit, but I couldn't get per-page templates to work out. Either they would work, or I would get weird errors about blocks not being known.
Webby worked, but I didn't like it.
Poole was the next one that I got far down the road with, but it allowed only a single site-wide template. Shame because otherwise I loved its flexibility enought to tolerate writing "macros" in Python.
I've still got to test more out, but it is a fun process. I fully intend to adopt an existing tool, and not keep working on my own.
Tonight I'm going to look at a few more.
Tags: poole, static, template 12 comments