A static website generator for developers. Written in Python, and uses the Mako templating library extensively.
I used other python based website generators before, but I felt the lack of control. I wanted to be able to have the power of a website generator engine, but still be able to add my own python code, or my custom HTML and CSS wherever I want.
I wanted a static website generator for programmers, but it was hard for me to find one. So I created Static Weber.
To use this you will have to know a bit about Mako and Python, and also a bit about HTML and CSS (Just a bit), though it will give you much more power flexibility than the usual static website generators out there.
Features:
- Basic Blog
- Syntax Highlighting with Pygments. (You should supply your own highlight css)
- Markdown blocks
- Mathjax inside Markdown blocks.
- Python scripting
- Mako templating. Specifically, you get page inheritance, which is great.
I wrote my website: http://www.xorpd.net with this template. In fact, this template was invented for my website.
I know some people are not going to use a website generator if it can not generate a "beauuutifuuul" website, so here you have your example :)
First clone this repository.
Next you will need to install mako and markdown: (I recommend to do it in virtualenv if you have one.)
pip install mako
pip install markdown
And finally if you want syntax highlighting:
pip install pygments
Now to build the website, run:
python3 website_tool.py build
Then you have the compiled website in the output folder. To view it, just click on index.html
To deploy, usually you will invoke:
python3 website_tool.py deploy "commit_message"
Currently it works with github pages. You could change it to do something else.
To really understand what is going on here, you should read a bit of Mako documentation (It's not so long), and know some python. I also assume that you know some HTML and CSS.
The Mako documentation could be found here: http://docs.makotemplates.org/en/latest/
website_tool.py is just a wrapper for make_website.py, which builds the website. I will explain here briefly how make_website.py builds the website. We will call it the builder from now on.
The builder will go over all the files inside the content folder, and it will create the output directory tree according to the contents directory tree. It distinguishes between a few types of files:
-
Files that will just be copied to the output folder, in the exact relative location. Those are pictures, css files etc. No transform is applied for these files.
-
.mako files. Those files will be rendered as Mako templates. The html result will be saved in the output folder.
-
.makoa files. (Mako Abstract) Those are "Abstract" Mako templates. They will not be rendered by the builder. Those files are useful for inheritance and similar things. If you just want a file to put pure python code, use .py files instead.
-
.makon files. (Mako No output) Those files will be rendered as Mako templates by the engine, however their output will not be saved in the output directory tree. Those files could be useful if you want to create some special file using a python script.
-
lib directory contains utility functions. If you just want to build your website, you shouldn't touch this directory.
-
blog directory contains all the blog posts. They all inherit from the blog_post.makoa Mako template.
-
inspectable.makoa - All pages inherit from this template. Generally speaking it allows you to inspect any template that you have for metadata. If you just want to create a website, you don't really care about it. Leave it there.
-
page.makoa - This is the base page template. It inherits from inspectable, and all your pages will inherit from page.makoa. If you want to put anything like google analytics, page.makoa is the place.
-
blog_index.mako and bindex.py both build the blog index. You can edit blog_index.mako to coustomize the way it looks like, but generally you wouldn't want to touch bindex.py, which is the engine to get the blog posts list.
-
blog_post.makoa: Inherit from page.makoa. blog_post.makoa is the base template for all blog posts inside the blog directory.
-
code_highligt.css is the code highlighting css. You can change it with another one. There are some nice ones you could find with a simple google search.
-
page_style.css is the main css for page.mako. It will apply to all your pages.
-
web_page.makoa inherits from page.makoa. Some pages inherit from web_page.makoa, instead of inheriting from page.makoa directly.
-
pics directory contains an example picture. You could add any other pictures as you wish, or even create other directories with other names.
-
pages directory: Contains various pages. They inherit from web_page.makoa.
Should be documented.
Utils file is pretty short. For now just read it and try to understand what is going on in there.