Simple Frozen website management
Project description
Or, just chill.
This is yet another static website generator. What’s different is that it uses a simple way of managing the content for the website. All page content is in a data directory with each page represented as the directory name. All the page content is either a separate file or is in a yaml file. A page accesses it’s data by first looking for it in it’s own directory and then all of it’s parent directories in order. So, setting a file called sitetitle.txt in the top level will be used by all pages in the site unless those pages also have a file with that name in their directory.
Templates are also used for a page in a similiar cascading manner. Each page can override any part of a template by just including it in it’s own directory. Any sub pages of that page directory will also use that template.
To get up and running quickly checkout this boilerplate code: https://github.com/jkenlooper/chill-boilerplate
Mustache Templates
Chill uses mustache templates as they are language agnostic, logicless, and pretty simple to use. This is important as chill was designed to be simple and as future-proof as possible when it comes to the actual website guts. All chill does is load up the mustache template or templates for a page and render it with the data it finds. This functionality could easily be improved on or replaced with any other software without need to modify any of the guts.
Overview of Resource Directories
There are two directories that are used when creating a website: themes, and data. Ideally, these are specified in your own buildout.cfg and are under some kind of version control. An example of these are included in the source of this package and are used for unit tests.
Themes
This directory can contain multiple theme directories each with their set of mustache templates and other resource files like css, js, images, and such. These get applied to a page when the page has set it’s special _theme variable to the name of the theme directory. Normally the _theme would be set at the top level of the data directory. All files within the themes directory can be accessed with a url like: ‘/_themes/default/css/site.css’ where ‘default’ is the name of the theme. Note, the mustache templates can also be accessed like this: ‘/_themes/default/base.mustache’.
Data
Each directory and it’s sub directories are made into HTML pages with the url being something like: /cheese/index.html . This would be for a directory at the top level with the name of ‘cheese’. Notice that the ‘index.html’ is created instead of a file called ‘cheese.html’. This is to help with future additions to the content where you may want sub pages under this directory, like: ‘/cheese/provolone/index.html’. Also, the ‘index.html’ part of the url for these can be omitted as webservers are usually configured to redirect to the ‘index.html’ if accessing a directory.
Building a website
A buildout config file will be needed to ‘buildout’ the site. At the least this will need to specify where the data and themes directories are located. A sample (and minimal) buildout.cfg can be seen below:
[buildout]
parts =
site_cfg
scripts
[scripts]
# installs the run and freeze scripts in the bin directory
recipe = zc.recipe.egg:scripts
eggs = chill
# The run and freeze scripts need this site.cfg file path sent to them.
arguments = '${buildout:parts-directory}/site.cfg'
[site_cfg]
# Creates the site.cfg in the parts directory
recipe = collective.recipe.template
input = inline:
HOST = '127.0.0.1' # default
PORT = 5000 # default
FREEZER_DESTINATION = "${buildout:directory}/frozen"
THEME_PATH = "${buildout:directory}/themes"
DATA_PATH = "${buildout:directory}/data"
output = ${buildout:parts-directory}/site.cfg
If you have buildout installed on your system then just run the command: buildout -c buildout.cfg or just buildout as it defaults to using the config file buildout.cfg. Buildout will create a few extra directories including a bin directory that will have the run and freeze scripts in it.
Buildout can also be installed on your system with pip install zc.buildout
bin/run
This script is used when you are developing your site’s content and structure. It stays in the foreground and logs access to the default host and port which is http://localhost:5000 . This really is just designed to run on your development machine and not under a production environment.
bin/freeze
This is basically a wrapper around the Frozen-Flask python package that freezes your site into static files ready to be uploaded to a server or something.
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