Thanks very much to everybody who commented, both publicly and privately, on my previous entry.
To recap: I have three sites that were each generated by slightly different templating software I'd built and tweaked over the years. I was frustrated that the three copies of the generation tool had all drifted and diverged from each other, and was looking to setup a new (static) site.
The obvious conclusion was either:
- Unify the creation tool I used, such that all four sites could be generated by a single tool.
- Avoid the pain of doing that, and suffer through a process of using a well-maintained tool maintained by somebody else. ("Suffer" because tags would be different, and the layout/template syntax would change.)
I'd cheerfully decided to go down the second route, because life is short. But after having quick reads, then spending several hours investigating likely contenders I kept finding reasons why they weren't suitable.
Today I reworked my tool to succesfully generate each of the three sites. That was less annoying than expected, after I'd decided "I'll have to change my templates anyway, when I switch to a real tool".
So in the interests of sharing I placed my tool online, and wrote documentation:
This is not a U-turn. This is not a commitment to avoid the investigation of real replacements. This is just something I had to do as a cleanup and to make sure I fully understood exactly what my requirements were.
In conclusion: My requirements are now absolutely known, fixed, and understood. I still firmly intend and expect to migrate to something by the end of the year. Ideally something that will make tag pages, RSS feeds, and other clever things easy.
(Getting rid of literal shell usage in my templates, and unifying the way I auto-generate galleries via file globs was a useful change in its own regard - I always felt slightly dirty..)
Lookout for more summaries and reviews of specific tools when I've had the chance to relax and start looking again.
Tags: templater No comments