Static Website Generators

[Samuel Richardson]

Has the list had any experience with static website generators?

I'm in the process of reworking our front end teams method of
generating websites and I'd like to introduce the use of SASS,
CoffeeScript and general good practices (like the use of
includes/partials!). The end result will still be HTML/CSS/JS but I
want the tools we use to get there to be a bit more sophisticated.
This is to enforce better coding and to speed site development up.

I've mocked up and used a prototype system that's similar to how I
want the end tool to work. That is, it will watch a folder full of
SASS files, CoffeeScript files etc and automatically transform them
into there more basic equivalents then compile them together into a
single asset file. What I've built is really just a prototype though,
and it will need quite a bit more work to get it ready for production
and other team members to use. I also don't want to reinvent the
wheel.

I've looked an nanoc, which looks super powerful, but it might be
overkill for what we want. The configuration looks quite complex and
some of the people that are going to be using it are junior front end
devs that might have come from a design background. In other words, it
needs to be somewhat foolproof and easy-ish to use.

I've gone through the static websites category on Ruby Toolbox and it
seems nanoc is the closest to what we want to use. I'd like it to be
fairly mature as well, if possible.

Samuel Richardson
www.richardson.co.nz | 0405 472 748

[Arunan Skanthan]

Being a ruby noob coming from a design/front-end background myself; I found nanoc rather easy use... the config does take a bit getting used to but maybe you can create a skeleton on github and get the new folk to just clone it. (I am trying to set it up in such a way myself; so please share any findings if possible... :D)

My $0.02

Cheers,
Arunan

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[Steven Ringo]

Sam,

I also found nanoc to be overkill. Strongly recommend http://get-serve.com/

Works out the box with HAML and SASS, and makes the upgrade path to rails easy (in terms of how it handles views and partials).

In development mode runs as a rack app, so you can use it with any rack-compliant web server — I use it with pow and works a treat.

If you want to output the static files handles that too.

Steve

[Samuel Richardson]

Any support for CoffeeScript in serve? I can't see any mention of it
on their site.

Samuel Richardson
www.richardson.co.nz | 0405 472 748

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[Steven Ringo]

Its in the Gemfile at https://github.com/jlong/serve/blob/master/Gemfile, and there are commits that allude to it, so it must be there. I haven't used CS support myself though.

[Arunan Skanthan]

Interesting, does it provide mustache support? Nanoc can't apparently because of the way it is structured... I'd be tempted to switch if it did.

Arunan

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[Samuel Richardson]

Ok, cool. It looks like the generation is static, does it offer a
"live" mode? I.e. it will watch files for changes then update
accordingly?

Samuel Richardson
www.richardson.co.nz | 0405 472 748

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[Steven Ringo]

As it says on the tin:

Static or dynamic – Your choice

Edit and tweak your websites on-the-fly with the Serve server. And when you are ready to deploy, you have two options. Either export to a pure HTML static site or deploy the source on any Ruby-friendly web host.

And in my original reply:

[Samuel Richardson]

Ok, thanks :)

Samuel Richardson
www.richardson.co.nz | 0405 472 748

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[Chris Douglas]

Check out https://github.com/mdub/pith

It has layouts, includes and support for haml, sass and coffeescript

[Korny Sietsma]

Or for another local effort, try Bonsai: https://github.com/benschwarz/bonsai

- Korny

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[Dominik Grabiec]

If you're rolling your own code anyway may I suggest trying StaticMatic
and rolling your own rake (to build both Haml, Sass, and CoffeeScript)
and Capistrano tasks (for deployment) with that. I've had success with
it in the past.

Dominik

[Lyndon Maydwell]

I've had great success recently with a combination of Sinatra and wget.

[Ben Schwarz]

With the advantage of having written one of these, I'd say "serve" is probably the best answer in the thread thus-far… 

Bonsai is good for abstracting that any ruby is being used (apart from it coming in gem-form), so it has been a hit with designery people.

Honestly though, I just use a sintra application every time. 

[Samuel Richardson]

Still investigating options and I've dug up something that seems to sit in between nanoc and serve in terms of complexity and features:

http://middlemanapp.com/

Samuel Richardson
www.richardson.co.nz | 0405 472 748

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[suranyami]

Jekyll seems good:

http://jekyllrb.com/

On Sep 22, 3:09 pm, Samuel Richardson <s...@richardson.co.nz> wrote:
> Still investigating options and I've dug up something that seems to sit in
> between nanoc and serve in terms of complexity and features:
>
> http://middlemanapp.com/
>

> Samuel Richardsonwww.richardson.co.nz| 0405 472 748

[Nahum Wild]

I use it for my blog without any issues. I've recently discovered this which sits ontop of Jekyll: http://octopress.org/

--nahum