preaction

Static site generators are popular these days. For small sites, the ability to quickly author content using simple tools is key. The ability to use lower-cost (even free) hosting, often without any dynamic capabilities, is good for trying to maintain a budget. For larger sites, the ability to serve content quickly and cheaply is beneficial, and since most pages are read far more often than they are written, generating a full web page to store on the filesystem can improve performance (and lower costs).

For me, I like the convenience of using Github Pages to host project-oriented websites. The project itself is already on Github, so why not keep the website closely tied to it so it doesn't get out-of-date? For an organization like the Chicago Perl Mongers, Github can even host custom domains, allowing easy collaboration on websites.

It's through the Chicago.PM website that I was introduced to Octopress, a blogging engine built on Jekyll. It's through using Octopress that I decided to write my own static site generator, Statocles.

Like the most popular static site generators, Statocles uses Markdown to generate HTML. Simple, readable plain text becomes HTML using Text::Markdown. A small bit of YAML on top allows for metadata like tags, keywords, and links. If you want to change formats, or even store your documents in a database instead of on a filesystem, you can write a custom store module.

Though currently primarily a blog and simple web site, Statocles is intended to be an application framework, allowing for custom ways to organize and display content.

Statocles can deploy itself to Git repositories, including Github, but it can also copy to another directory to be served by the local web server. If you've got another way you need to deploy, you can write a custom deploy module.

With this announcement, Statocles is beta-quality. The big API changes I wanted to make are out of the way, and I'm working towards some useful developer features before I mark a 1.0 stable release.

Statocles currently comes with:

• A blog application which supports tags and RSS and Atom feeds
• A Perldoc application to render the documentation for a Perl project
• An application for plain markdown pages and static files
• sitemap.xml to help search engines navigate the site
• A simple theme built on the Skeleton CSS library and using Mojolicious template syntax
• A command-line application to create, manage, build, test, and deploy your website
• Event handlers to hook into Statocles build/deploy workflow and add custom behaviors

Future plans include:

• More apps
  • A calendar
  • An image or presentation gallery
• More ways to deploy
  • Run any command (rsync, cp, ftp)
  • Deploy to a CDN
• Content helpers
  • Call custom Perl code from your templates, and your content
• Dynamocles
  • A web application to edit Statocles sites

Here are some websites currently using Statocles:

• http://preaction.github.io/ My personal blog, using the default theme.
• http://chicago.pm.org Chicago Perl Mongers, which uses some very small additions to the default theme
• http://preaction.github.io/Statocles The Statocles website (of course), which shows the Perldoc app http://preaction.github.io/Statocles/pod

Join me in #statocles on irc.perl.org for questions or comments, or write up a bug or feature request on Statocles's Github page.