Íon - Shocking simple static (site) generator

About

Static site generators are softwares that produces HTML and other static web formats like JSON as output. This output is then served just like the early years of web, what makes it fast. Content and templates are kept separated in different files, so changes are easy to make.

The advantages of static site generators are:

• Security - No database, no user input, nothing. Just plain old HTML.
• Performance - As I said, it's just HTML. Servers will love you.
• Easy to migrate/copy from/to anywhere. It's just a bunch of plain files.
• Easy to track changes and maintain websites with version controls systems like git.

And the disadvantages:

• No comments, pingbacks, search, contact forms or anything dynamic (although most of this itens can be implemented with third party services like Disqus)
• Not very user-friendly.

So, static site generators are systems you can use for specific cases.

Quickstart

Install Íon

Íon comes with a _ion folder and a Python ion.py script. Put these files in a new directory in your web root. If you want to create more than one site, move ion.py out of the directory created and put it in system PATH. Regardless of its location, ion.py must be run in the root folder of your site (i.e. the same where the folder _ion is).

You need Python 3 to run Íon.

Configure

Open the config.ini in _ion folder and define your settings.

• base_url - Will be used by for absolute linking.
• default_theme - If a custom theme is not provided for a page, this theme will be used.
• blocked_dirs - The directories you don't want Íon to read.

Create your first page

Just run the spark command in the site root folder to create a new page:

python3 ion.py spark

If you're not in the site root, you have to pass a path as second parameter:

python3 ion.py spark path/to/folder

This will create a data.ion model file. You're ready to start adding your own content:

title: My first post
date: 2012/05/20
content:
My page content

Now run the charge command:

python3 ion.py charge

This will create a HTML and a JSON file in the folder you specified. Done!

Theming and page variables.

You can add new themes to _ion/themes, create and use optional variables without having to edit all your previous .ion files. If you want a page to use a specific theme, just add the definition in data.ion:

title: My first post
theme: mytheme
date: 2012/05/20
content:
My page content

Defining new variables is as simple as that. Just add any new definition to your data.ion and make the theme render it:

author: Bob

In theme file:

{{author}}

New themes must obey the same file structure of the default theme.

Javascript/CSS automatic detection

Just put the files in the page folder and Íon will create the tags in your theme.

And another thing...

• All page content stay in its own folder - so each page is independent.
• Uses the file system hierarchy to simulate pages and sub-pages.

Roadmap

• Generate RSS feeds
• Page listings

Help

• ion.py spark [path/to/folder] - Creates an empty page on path specified.
• ion.py charge [path/to/folder] - Generates HTML/JSON files of each folder under the path specified and its subfolders, recursively.