Still - A composable static site builder

Hi,

This looks very promising. I never tried Still but I’ve heard really good thing about it, I’ll try it for my next static website

Thank you for contributing!

The page itself looks great (the posters too). I have searched before for a static site generator in elixir, great to see it.
I haven’t had time to check it through, only a superficial reading, does this work only as a static generator, or can you use it as phoenix app if you wanted to?
(because I have in my “backlog” the idea of having a phoenix app, that could spit a static website if wanted, but then could just be a normal app if the need ever comes, like nuxt does for instance)

Or the other way around: a static site that seamlessly integrated with a phoenix site, all built from the same source repo.

But I think that in that case it either it would have to be served as static assets, probably with some catch all route that forwarded to a router that would sit beneath the normal routes - but here you would basically loose the ability to “seamlessly” integrate other parts of phoenix, like having assigns, small helper/partial templates and such, or it would probably be quite difficult to glue it together into an existing static file in case you wanted those? I might also be misunderstanding what you envision.

I don’t have a grand vision of how to achieve this, but right now there is a disconnect between a static site (for the content web) and a dynamic site (for the application web). In many cases, the application web need to serve static contents, such as documentation, and the content web need to serve dynamic contents, like forum, e-commerce, etc. If there is a way to blend the 2 together seamlessly and use the best tool for the task, both the user experience and the development effort can be greatly improved.

I don’t know exactly what the integration with Pheonix would look like, but it’s something that’s on my mind, and I think there’s even an open issue for it. You can install Still in the app where you have Phoenix and compile the website priv/static during the build step of your deployment. Or you can compile it to anywhere in priv and use rules such as the ones we have the dev server to serve those assets. With that in place, I guess you can call anything from the templates. You could make queries to Ecto or something like that. I need to try this out.

This looks superb! Good luck with it!

If I could offer another project for inspiration, I love “pmwiki” and the way they have made the whole thing function by pages including other pages, and the use of metadata/variables that can be attached to each page. So it’s trivial to add a header section to a group of pages by just optionally creating another page which is only included if it exists. Breadcrumbs/prev/next links can be added by scanning metadata, or by examining content on an index page. A built in search feature can have its output fed through a formatter to do cool things like creating a blog index page, or a sidebar showing x latest posts, or y latest events, etc.

There is a point where stuff starts to get tricky with all site generators and you need to start coding. I think they did a great job of making it really trivial to introduce new features with very little code, often just through conditional insertion of pages, or torturing the search function, etc

Good luck with this!

It would be really fantastic if you could somehow have it be a runtime: false dependency so it does all the compiling at comptime and drops it into priv/static with an appropriate router module.

I was not aware of this nice Slime template engine:

https://github.com/slime-lang/slime

It seems that it’s inspired in Slim from Ruby and looks like a very clean template engine… need to give it a try

That’s the idea and I believe it’s already possible. I need to try it out and document the process. You would run mix still.compile like you run mix phx.digest.