Static site generators.

[Justin Obara]

Hi Jon,

Thanks for the reply. I'm going to answer those in reverse order.

I think your 5th requirement makes sense, as it would likely affect the level of documentation available and activity on the project in general. 

"Why Weld?" is a good question. The simple answer is that it doesn't require any special syntax mixed in with the markup. This allows for clean templates that are valid markup. Which fits with our philosophies in Infusion and will be an easier transition if we switch to an internally made rendering system some time in the future.

That being said, since none of them support it directly and we can write plugins for all of them, maybe we can defer this to later and just start wtih Jade for our evaluation.

Thanks
Justin


On Jan 28, 2014, at 9:12 AM, Jonathan Hung <jhung at ocadu.ca> wrote:

> 2) Good templating engine. Weld seems to be the best choice of templating engines as it uses standard markup for templates.
> 
> What are the reasons for using Weld? eco and Jade are pretty prominent these days and may be worth considering. Should we evaluate templating engines in a similar decision-making process since there are so many varieties - each with their strengths and weaknesses?
> 
> I would like to suggest a 5th requirement for community support and adoption.
> 
> - Jon. 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 9:11 PM, Justin Obara <obara.justin at gmail.com> wrote:
> About a week ago a discussion regarding static site generators was started in regards to the work on the floeproject.org site. In the end we went with the simple approach of just building the sites by hand, but have allocated time at the Feb 19th community meeting to discuss it further.
> 
> I don't think we'll have enough time in a single community meeting to sort through all of the static site generators, get an understanding of their pros/cons, and make an informed decision. With that in mind I'd like to go through what the requirements should be and a proposal for which ones to test in preparation for the Feb 19th community meeting.
> 
> Requirements:
> 
> 1) node.js based. 
> We are doing a lot of infrastructure work in node these days and it should provided a simpler route forward if/when we start working on an authoring tool. Also it will minimize the systems we need to maintain.
> 
> 2) Good templating engine. Weld seems to be the best choice of templating engines as it uses standard markup for templates.
> 
> 3) Open Source with a amenable license. For extending, contributing, and etc.
> 
> 4) JSON-driven architecture
> 
> 
> Systems to test:
> 
> There are at least 219 static site generators. We obviously don't have the time and resources to test all of them, and of course a lot won't meet the above requirements. I suggest we narrow this down to 2 primary options with a third as a first candidate replacement in case we run into any dire issues.
> 
> Primary:
> DocPad
> Wintersmith
> 
> Fall Back:
> Punch
> 
> One note about all of the suggested static site generators above is that none of them natively support Weld templates; however they all support plugins for the templating engine. In each case we'll need to write our own plugin, but it doesn't appear that this should be too difficult. The only static site generator seen to use Weld natively is Blacksmith, although development on it hasn't been as consistent or recent as for the suggested ones.
> 
> Thanks
> Justin
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> JONATHAN HUNG
> 
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>  
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