Static site generators.

[Justin Obara]

Hi Colin,

Just to clarify things. I'm not suggesting that we actually use Jade here on out, just that in terms of evaluating the two static site generators, it has less of an impact. That being said, evaluating the ease of writing plugins is useful, but since they both support template plugins, and that's likely not something we will be doing often, it seemed reasonable to drop this requirement for the evaluation round.

What I would suggest instead is that we aim to collect information on the ease of use and viability of the static site generators and present this along with a recommendation on which one to go with, for the Feb 19th community meeting. This recommendation will come with the caveat that we will need to attempt to write a Weld plugin for it. At which point we can decide as a community if we want to go with the recommended static site generator. In this way, we won't have to spend the time to write two plugins.

I agree that we need to keep the big picture in mind and be forward looking. Also, I'd really like to avoid having to rewrite mounds of templates if we change the templating engine in the future. Using plain markup seems the best way forward for this. I hope my proposal can achieve this, as well as minimize the resource cost of evaluation. 

Let me know what you think.

Thanks
Justin

On Jan 28, 2014, at 2:25 PM, Colin Clark <colinbdclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On Jan 28, 2014, at 11:19 AM, Justin Obara <obara.justin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> "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.
> 
> As a community, we have been dedicated to exploring alternatives to the “all mixed together” model of templating that is the prevailing style inherited from PHP. We should continue to pursue this value of unobtrusiveness and separation of the architectural layers with the tools we use for our own work.
> 
> Writing a plugin for Weld templates will also be an excellent opportunity to verify the flexibility of the options we are considering. Keep in mind that within the next year or so, we will have our new Renderer available, and will undoubtedly want to integrate it into whatever solution we end up choosing. Let’s not loose sight of the big picture while choosing shorter-term technologies to use in our community.
> 
> I hope this helps clarify,
> 
> Colin