Wok is a static website generator. It turns a pile of templates, content, and resources (like CSS and images) into a neat stack of plain HTML. You run it on your local computer, and it generates a directory of web files that you can upload to your web server, or serve directly.
The idea is that you don't need a big server-side engine like PHP, Drupal, Django, etc. to generate every page, every visit, for every visitor. Caching helps, but it can only do so much. Instead, you can generate the entire site once ahead of time, and only regenerate things when something has changed, e.g, with a post-commit hook on a Git repository containing your content or layout.
Wok is similar in concept to other static site generators, like Jekyll, Hyde, and nanoc, but different in a few ways, like a page/subpage category system, and a restricted focus of features. For example, instead of providing tools to generate RSS feeds directly, the tools that are needed to build a generic XML document are provided.
- Content and presentation are separated
- Markdown, reStructuredText, and plain text renders
- Jinja2-based templating system
- Optional syntax highlighting via Pygments
- Tagging and a hierarchical category system
- Simple development server
- Pagination support
- Custom Python hooks that run during site generation