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NAME

templer - A static-site generator, written in perl.

SYNOPSIS

  templer [options]


  Help Options:

    --help        Show the help information for this script.
    --manual      Read the manual for this script.

  Flags

    --config=I<FILE> Use I<FILE> as global config file
    --force          Force a rebuild of all pages/assets
    --in-place       Specify we're processing pages in-place, ignoring the output dir.
    --quiet          Don't show output.
    --verbose        Be noisy during the execution.

ABOUT

Templer is the static-site generator utility I use for my websites.

Templer flexible with input pages, and allows variables to be defined on a global or per-page basis, and then inserted into the output.

Given a single template a complete site may be generated with an arbitrary number of pages, each sharing a common look and feel. If required you can define a range of templates and select which to use on a per-page basis.

We allow variable interpolation, loops, and conditional expansion in the generated output via the use of the HTML::Template module.

The name? It stuck. Initially I was thinking "templator" and "Templer" popped into my mind, via Knights Templer.

Live Usage

This code is in use on several domains I host/maintain:

http://blogspam.net/
http://kvm-hosting.org/
http://steve.org.uk/
http://stolen-souls.com/

Originally I had one utility to generate the HTML for each of those sites, called 'webgen'. Over time this single version divererged into several, as I made ad-hoc changes to cope with the different sites.

Templer was created to replace my previous script, ensuring that each of the site-specific requirements would continue to be satisified, on that basis it should be generally flexible and usable by others.

Site Structure

A templer-based site consists of a configuration file templer.cfg and an input directory. Input files are processed with HTML::Template, to expand any variables set in the pages themselves, or in the global template.

Once page-content is expanded it is then inserted into a global layout template.

There are two modes of operation when it comes to processing files:

"In-place"

Files are processed and the suffix is replaced with .html

Output Path

Files are generated in a distinct output-tree, and any static assets such as JPG, GIF, PNG, CSS, and JS files are copied across too.

This allows you to run in-place in your ~/public_html directory or to setup an output path which is later synced to your final/live location.

Code Layout

The implementation uses several simple classes, mostly as wrappers around variable parsing:

Templer::Global

This contains the parsing code for the global configuration file, which is located at the top-level directory of the site. (It must be named templer.cfg).

Templer::Plugin::Factory

A class-factory for loading/invoking plugin methods.

Templer::Site

Given an input directory this module finds and returns Templer::Site::Asset and Templer::Site::Page objects for each file present. This module is also where all the actual building occurs.

Templer::Site::Asset

An item which requires zero expansion. Media, javascript, etc.

Templer::Site::Page

A page which requires template expansion.

Templer::Timer

A utility to report upon time-durations.

Note #1: The command-line options override those specified in the global object.

Note #2: The global object has sensible defaults.

Questions / Bug Reports

The code is developed and hosted on gitub in the following location:

https://github.com/skx/templer

Please raise any issues in the tracker there.

LICENSE

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either:

a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version, or

b) the Perl "Artistic License".

AUTHOR

 Steve
 --
 http://www.steve.org.uk/

LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2012-2015 by Steve Kemp. All rights reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. The LICENSE file contains the full text of the license.