hpr1203 :: templer: a static html generator
An introduction to Steve Kemp's static site generator, written in Perl
Hosted by Chess Griffin on Wednesday, 2013-03-13 is flagged as Explicit and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
templer, static site, perl, HTML::Template, Textile, Markdown.
2.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr1203
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Duration: 00:08:55
general.
In today's show Chess talks to us about a static html generator written in perl called templer
Templer
Templer is yet another static site generator, written in Perl.
It makes use of the HTML::Template module for performing variable expansion within pages and layouts, along with looping and conditional-statement handling.
Templer has evolved over time for my own personal use, but I believe it is sufficiently generic it could be useful to others.
My motivation for putting it together came from the desire to change several hand-made, HTML-coded, sites to something more maintainable such that I could easily change the layout in one place.
The design evolved over time but the key reason for keeping it around is that it differs from many other simple static-generators in several ways:
- You may define global variables for use in your pages/layouts.
- A page may define and use page-specific variables.
- You may change the layout on a per-page basis if you so wish.
- This was something that is missing from a lot of competing tools.
- Conditional variable expansion is supported, via
HTML::Template. - File contents, shell commands, and file-globs may be used in the templates
- This allows the trivial creation of galleries, for example.
- These are implemented via plugins.
- You may also embed perl code in your pages.
Another key point is that the layouts allow for more than a single simple "content" block to be placed into them - you can add arbitrary numbers of optional side-menus, for example.
Although this tool was written and used with the intent you'd write your site-content in HTML you can write your input pages in Textile or Markdown if you prefer (these inputs are supported via plugins).