StaticMatic - The End

[Stephen Bartholomew]

For a while there have been questions raised as to the ongoing
maintenance and development of staticmatic so I thought it time to
make my position clear.

When I wrote staticmatic there weren't the large number of static site
solutions out there. The libraries that did exist were complicated to
use and set up - I wanted something more Rails-like and created
staticmatic to fill this need.

For a number of reasons (most of which I've whined about here
previously), I'm not keeping up with maintenance and progress of the
library or actively developing the community. This has been difficult
as I've hit the same bugs and imperfections as everyone else while
using staticmatic for work. Because of the constraints on my time, my
solution was to look for another library. To my mind there's nothing
more staticmatic-like than Middleman.

Thomas Reynolds used to contribute to staticmatic before deciding that
he wanted more from a library than I at the time was willing to
accept. He was proved completely right in his judgements as sometime
later he released middleman and I was blown away by how close it was
to my vision for the future of staticmatic.

Middleman has (amongst many other things) multiple template language
support (erb, haml, sass, coffeescript etc etc), rails-style helpers,
intelligent static file building - all very well structured, tested
and maintained. I now use Middleman for all my static sites and
prototypes.

So where does this leave staticmatic?

As far as I'm concerned, staticmatic has served it's purpose. It was
built in frustration and is now struggling under the strain of new
feature requirements and neglect. As such I recommend that you all
make the shift to middleman for your new projects.

Thomas is working on a staticmatic > middleman converter that will
make all existing sites compatible with middleman. He may need a bit
of help with this for the more complicated sites & extensions.

So - this is open source software and you don't really *need* me. I'm
happy to hand over the reins but I've not yet found someone willing
and capable of taking staticmatic where it needs to go with the degree
of quality it deserves - and to be blunt - you'll just be emulating
middleman.

There are a *lot* of imperfections and problems with the staticmatic
codebase. Personally I think it would benefit from a near-full rewrite
to make it fit for future development.

The best action IMO is to help Thomas with his project - there's
plenty to help out with for documentation, fixes and development.

Comments are welcome and if you seriously feel there's still a place
for staticmatic, do let me know - I'd love to hear your plans and
ideas for bringing it up to scratch.

Cheers,

Steve

---
For info on Middleman see:
https://github.com/tdreyno/middleman/
http://awardwinningfjords.com/2009/10/22/middleman.html
http://thechangelog.com/post/274269429/middleman-a-static-site-generator-with-haml-sass

[Adam Stacoviak]

Thanks for everything Steve! It did serve its purpose. I haven't
played with middleman yet, so ... and I haven't really had a need for
staticmatic in ages, though I do have a few basic sites that used it.

Anyone who wants a simple staticmatic bootstrap because, well ... you
want to use something that's simple check out https://github.com/adamstac/staticmatic-bootstrap

> For info on Middleman see:https://github.com/tdreyno/middleman/http://awardwinningfjords.com/2009/10/22/middleman.htmlhttp://thechangelog.com/post/274269429/middleman-a-static-site-genera...