praktikantenblog

Within the next weeks i will have a closer look at existing ‘statig website generators’ / ‘static cms’ written in ruby. So far, i had brief looks at nanoc, Jekyll, webby, webgen and staticmatic.

Jekyll

The first one i had a closer look at, was jekyll. I recommend to start by having a look at the runtime dependency list, as it gives a first good insight in what jekyll actually does. It comes with an integrated Webserver, and auto-regenerates it’s sites, whenever new content is added. Basically you have a config file, some static html pages (if you need those), some layouts, and blog posts (or whatever content) that you can add in textile format. Once you’ve generated a site, you will find the static html results in it’s subfolder, e.g. _site.

Runtime Dependencies

Liquid: Templating system (Ruby) Classifier: Generating related posts (Ruby) Maruku: Default markdown engine (Ruby) Directory Watcher: Auto-regeneration of sites (Ruby) Open4: Talking to pygments for syntax highlighting (Ruby) Pygments: Syntax highlighting (Python)

I’ve linked some of the probably most interesting dependencies, at least for me.

• ‘Directory Watcher’ is scanning a directory for changes, and sends events (changed, added, removed) to registered overservers (in this case jekyll, which reacts with a regeneration of the site.
• Having a look at Liquid, gives a first overview over how jekyll templates and layouts look like. You might also have a look at the Jekyll-specific “Yaml-Front-Matters”.

Configuration

You should really have a look at the available configuration options as they give a good feeling about scope and capacity of jekyll. Besides configuring the webserver, you can turn syntax hilighting (with pygments), auto-regeneration and indexing of related posts on and off. You can also define the Style of your Permalinks.

Template Beauty

While liquid already provides some tags and filters to ease your life as a template designer, jekyll adds some extensions, such as counting words in a piece of text, adding Code Highlighting and including partial like html-snippets (from the _includes folder in your jekyll base).

Sites running Jekyll

If you need some inspiration, or just come usable code to look at, don’t miss out the list of existing jekyll sites. Most of them even put their sites source on github, so you can clone ready-to-use sites, run them locally and play a bit around, before you setup your own.