renderables is a comically minimal python library that can serve as a starting point for writing one-off static site generators. (A static site generator is a program that generates a set of files that constitute a "static" website. Static websites are simply websites that don't make use of any programming on the side of the web server, so they're very simple and cheap to host, and easily portable.) Building on renderables, you can write toy blogging engines or little weekly link logs, or do just about anything that requires outputting HTML, but is too weird to work with more fully featured static site generators. (Personally, I'm a big fan of jekyll if you need something professional and mature. middleman is also nice.)
With modern HTML and CSS, it's surprisingly straightforward to create beautiful websites, why not give it a try!
The examples/ folder contains some starting points: The code that runs tabs.marcel.computer (a small link blog) and the code that runs notes.marcel.science (a small blog).
renderables is nothing you couldn't write yourself in about half a day of work. But maybe, using it can save you that half a day! At it's core, it's basically some scaffolding on top of the extremely powerful mako templating engine, of which I'm using about 1% of the features, and probably in entirely the wrong way.
renderables is built on the assumption that you have a site directory (name doesn't matter) that looks like this:
site
/config.yaml
/environments
/some_name
entry.html
tag.html
...
/plan
index.html
something.html
...
(whatever other content you want to process goes here)
It then defines a Site class that you can subclass as needed, which takes this folder as initialisation argument. The Site in turn instantiates a Plan and Environments. The Plan represents the blueprint for building the page, and Environments is responsible for looking up templates. You can define a class hierarchy for your content as needed; things that need to appear on the website can subclass Renderable, which provides the following functionality: if .render(some_name) is called, renderables tries to find a mako template in site/environments/some_name/classname.html, and renders it, passing classname=instance as argument to mako's rendering functionality.
I know this is a mouthful, but it basically means that you can define HTML representations of arbitrary classes that depend on context, i.e. a blog post can appear in a condensed form on your index page, and then in an expanded form when you actually view the post.
Calling site.render() will crate a _build directory in site, and do nothing else -- you'll have to implement a site._render() method yourself in a suitable subclass, and take care of actually getting content to render. site.plan exposes a copy_folder method to wholesale copy things from your site to _build, and render_template can be used to explicitly render a template. Good luck!
The examples folder shows how to create a weekly link blog like tabs.marcel.computer, and may be a lot more instructive than the above text. :-)
Good luck! Make your own website! Keep the internet weird! ‡
git clone this repository, run pip install -e .. Start hacking!