Stati, a PHP static site generator that works on any existing Jekyll site
Success !
Well it’s been quite a week. Having had an unexpected lull in my contract work, I decided to work on something fun. I use jekyll for most of my static sites, and I quite like it. It’s still a mistery to me why I decided to build a clone of it. But anyway, one week later, here we are. Stati can now build all my ex-Jekyll sites properly. Actually this blog is now generated with Stati!
Architecture
I read this How does Jekyll work blog post that gives a nice high level overview of the jekyll architecture, and I decided to mostly use the same kind of process.
A main Site class holds most of the state while the generation is in progress, with events being dispatched at several steps along the process so that plugins can hook into them and modify the input, the output, or simply monitor the progress of the generation process.
First all files are read, in different manner depending on their type (static files, posts or pages), then they are rendered (again differently depending on their type) and finally they are written to disk at the correct path.
Plugins
At each point in this process, a plugin can come into play to add pages, have them written in different locations, etc…
The first plugin, and the one that is used by most Jekyll sites I know of, is the paginator. In the case of Stati, it basically takes a list of all posts and generates a new html page for each page of posts. The core Writer then takes care of putting it in it’s proper path.
The second plugin is a related posts plugin. For each post it calculates the levenshtein distance of it’s title to all the other posts titles and gets the 10 best matches. Lots of room for improvement here.
Try it now!
So basically that’s it, a fun project that I will probably continue to use and improve. If you’d like to give it a try, you can get the latest release from github and, most importantly, open an issue if you run into a snag!
PS. I just remembered I have a history of doing this kind of thing
UPDATE : Just got some documentation online
