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Static site generation on python

45 points| dfrodriguez143 | 13 years ago |blog.getpelican.com | reply

26 comments

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[+] mixedbit|13 years ago|reply
Static sites are cool! I generate my blog with Tinkerer http://www.tinkerer.me which is also Python and ReStructuredText based. Although Pelican seems to be more generic, while Tinkerer is mainly for blogs.
[+] meaty|13 years ago|reply
Agree about static sites being cool. It seems such a terrible waste of energy dynamically generating content each request.
[+] RandallBrown|13 years ago|reply
Probably should put what Pelican is on the homepage. It was weird having to go to the doc page to figure out what it actually was.
[+] supar|13 years ago|reply
Does anyone have some experience with pelican (possibly liquidink) and rest2web?

There are many static website generators, but I'm looking into a python+ReST solution. I've been using rest2web a lot, and I really love it's simplicity compared to the other solutions. rest2web is really straightforward. In the end, it's the python-docutils module that does most of the work anyway, while rest2web simply collects the website structure.

The only downside is that rest2web lacks a bit of polish, and I really wished it would come with the ability to generate rss feeds for a particular tree or tag. I was thinking about writing a plugin, but I'm unsure.

pelican seem to be already be done for the purpose. Actually, pelican seem to target mostly blogs, while I actually just want "a feed of changes" for a particular directory tree. I don't want a blog-turned-into-a-website approach.

Does anybody had this problem? I'm really looking for feedback from people that used rest2web here and moved to pelican/liquidink, or back maybe. Figuring out the limitations of these tools require a long time investment and I cannot really decide by just trying it out on toy pages.

[+] rplnt|13 years ago|reply
I tried pelican several times, but I always found it to be too complicated to what I want. I went through setup, generated some pages and when I started to tinker around with it I had a feeling it would be easier to write something from scratch.

Do you know any other static page generators, simpler and preferably in Python as well? Or should I just get over the first impression and go with the pelican?

[+] loftsy|13 years ago|reply
Django can be easily adapted to write static pages using the template api and writing to a file. Works well for me.
[+] brass9|13 years ago|reply
I use nanoc (http://nanoc.ws/). It's written in Ruby - but it's quite powerful yet so very simple to use.

I've split hair over jekyll/octopress configuration until I stumbled upon this nimble beauty... haven't looked back since.

Give nanoc a try.

[+] nry|13 years ago|reply
I had the same feeling when I was using pelican as well. I have switched my personal site over to blogofile: http://www.blogofile.com/

Much simpler and better documentation in my opinion.

[+] BruceM|13 years ago|reply
I use Pelican on a couple of sites (like http://dylanfoundry.org/). One thing that I really like is that it is ReStructured Text, so most of the same things that I do with Sphinx for docs can carry over and the work that I've done with Pygments for syntax highlighting, still applies.

There's some room for improvement here and there, but it works pretty well and was easy to get going.

[+] yen223|13 years ago|reply
Are there any good guides to using ReStructuredText?

I love all things Python, but for some reason I could never wrap my head around ReStructuredText's syntax. Maybe it's because all my favorite sites use Markdown (including this one!), but I find Markdown's syntax to be more intuitive.

[+] d0m|13 years ago|reply
Ha, didn't know Dylan. Seems like a fun little language. Thanks for sharing.
[+] mahmoudimus|13 years ago|reply
Definitely love pelican as well. I've generated http://mahmoudimus.com/blog with it and it's just fantastic.

Plus, I can use ReST -- a lot of the other static site generators just focus on Markdown. If you use python, ReST is your bread and butter.

[+] traeblain|13 years ago|reply
Love Pelican. Found it to be simplest "blog aware" generator for Python I could find. Because it keeps maturing, there's a ton of stuff you can do with it. But simply propping it up and starting a site, was amazingly easy.

`pelican-quickstart` and you are up and running.

[+] dfrodriguez143|13 years ago|reply
I am considering moving from Jekyll to Pelical just because is python.