Webby community and development, is it alive?

[Kyle Cordes]

I find Webby very useful, its basic operational model is a good fit
for many sites.

But it also has a list of issues to work out, a great need for a
documentation revamp (everything updated and unified, currently many
piece of reference/intro info can only be learned by searching and
reading a lunch of forum post), etc.

There are very few forum posts this year, and at least one important
one (asking how to detect/highlight the current page in navbars) went
unanswered.

I'm trying to get a feel for whether there is some development going
on in forks, but at the moment this github page won't populate for me:

http://github.com/TwP/webby/network

Is Webby still alive? Or, if people have drifted off towards
alternative static-web-site-builder tools, which one(s) are most
comparable?

-Kyle

[Jacques Crocker]

Seems dead to me. I ended up switching a couple static sites over to nanoc3, however I think I still like the simplicity of webby.

What I was mainly using webby for was for prototyping site ui ideas. I found an awesome replacement for that here: http://github.com/jlong/serve

[aimee daniells]

Webby is sadly not doing too well. It is not compatible with Ruby 1.9 and i don't think much effort is being put in to making it compatible (though i'd love to be proved wrong on that!)

I am still very fond of Webby, and i've used it recently.

Jacques, thanks for mentioning nanoc, that looks spookily similar to Webby. Is it a fork?

aimee

[Robert Wahler]

This fork works under Ruby 1.9.1

http://github.com/robertwahler/webby

-robert

[aimee daniells]

Oooh, thank you Robert! Good work! :)

[Robert Wahler]

You will also need my fork of directory_watcher if you use the
autobuild functionality.

http://github.com/robertwahler/directory_watcher


On Jun 14, 11:45 am, aimee daniells <aimeedanie...@googlemail.com>
wrote:

> Oooh, thank you Robert! Good work! :)
>

[aimee daniells]

I do use autobuild - thank you so much! :)

On 14 Jun 2010 20:23, "Robert Wahler" <robert...@gmail.com> wrote:

You will also need my fork of directory_watcher if you use the
autobuild functionality.

http://github.com/robertwahler/directory_watcher


On Jun 14, 11:45 am, aimee daniells <aimeedanie...@googlemail.com>
wrote:

> Oooh, thank you Robert! Good work! :)
>

> On 13 June 2010 18:13, Robert Wahler <robertwah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

> > This fork works under R...

[Richard Conroy]

On Jun 11, 4:52 pm, Kyle Cordes <kyle.cor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is Webby still alive? Or, if people have drifted off towards
> alternative static-web-site-builder tools, which one(s) are most
> comparable?

Kyle,
it seems that while Webby is hardly dead (there are still people
using it to update their sites), there doesn't seem to be much of
an active community. As a result, chatter, new ideas and fresh
content is tailing off.

Compare with Jekyll, which is another site generator with has
less features. Jekyll's popularity went skyrocketing when it got
integrated with GitHub.

Whereas Webby is practically drowning in features yet its less
popular and this group is very quiet. In fact its an apt metaphor:
there are so many features and different ways of doing things
in Webby, many quite powerful, yet a lack of solid information
in using it well.

Its possible that static site generators is a niche tool space,
where power and features are not the biggest draw.

To answer your question though, I haven't used anything that
is comparable to webby, though Jekyll is popular and may have
an active community that could answer your question better.

regards,
Richard.
--
http://richardconroy.blogspot.com

[Tim Pease]

On Jun 24, 2010, at 5:15 AM, Richard Conroy wrote:

> On Jun 11, 4:52 pm, Kyle Cordes <kyle.cor...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Is Webby still alive? Or, if people have drifted off towards
>> alternative static-web-site-builder tools, which one(s) are most
>> comparable?
>
> Kyle,
> it seems that while Webby is hardly dead (there are still people
> using it to update their sites), there doesn't seem to be much of
> an active community. As a result, chatter, new ideas and fresh
> content is tailing off.
>
> Compare with Jekyll, which is another site generator with has
> less features. Jekyll's popularity went skyrocketing when it got
> integrated with GitHub.
>
> Whereas Webby is practically drowning in features yet its less
> popular and this group is very quiet. In fact its an apt metaphor:
> there are so many features and different ways of doing things
> in Webby, many quite powerful, yet a lack of solid information
> in using it well.
>

Well said. Richard, you've hit upon my own frustrations with Webby. It grew too complex, aping too many features of Rails.

> Its possible that static site generators is a niche tool space,
> where power and features are not the biggest draw.
>

Definitely a niché tool space. However, generators are everywhere. Rails templates when starting a new site; hoe and its related tool "sow" for creating new gems; sproutcore has templates, and it unifies and minifies javascript and CSS.

Lot's of applications, but they all have different little tricks they need to pull off.

> To answer your question though, I haven't used anything that
> is comparable to webby, though Jekyll is popular and may have
> an active community that could answer your question better.
>

I've not used Jekyl, but it does seem pretty popular. There is also webgen and nanoc.

Webby is not quite dead ... just lying dormant for a bit.

Blessings,
TwP

[Joel VanderWerf]

Tim Pease wrote:
> Webby is not quite dead ... just lying dormant for a bit.

Good to hear that. My own use of webby (documenting a programming
framework that rdoc isn't suited for) is also a bit dormant at the
moment. The recent activity on kramdown is exciting, however...