[Haskell-cafe] ANN: yst 0.2.1

[Jinjing Wang]

It's possible to serve the generated site with maid, in case apache is
not available:

cabal update
cabal install maid

yst create testsite
cd testsite
yst

cd site
maid

now goto http://localhost:3000/

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 9:05 AM, John MacFarlane<jgm at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I'm pleased to announce the release of yst, now available on HackageDB.
> yst generates static websites from YAML or CSV data files and
> StringTemplates. This approach combines the speed, security, and ease of
> deployment of a static website with the flexibility and maintainability
> of a dynamic site that separates presentation and data.
>
> The easiest way to get a feel for yst is to try it:
>
> cabal update
> cabal install yst
> yst create testsite
> cd testsite
> yst
>
> yst attempts to fill a niche between two kinds of site creation tools.
> On the one hand you have simple static site generators like webgen,
> webby, nanoc, and my old custom system using make and pandoc. On the
> other hand, you have dynamic web frameworks like rails and django.
> For my own smallish websites, I found that the dynamic frameworks were
> overkill. Nobody but me was going to edit the pages, and I didn't
> want the trouble of writing and deploying a dynamic site, setting up
> a web server, and administering a database. A static site would be
> faster, easier to deploy, and more secure. But the dynamic frameworks
> offered one thing that the static site generators did not: an easy way
> to separate data from presentation. This was becoming increasingly
> important to me as I found myself constantly updating the same
> information (say, publication data for a paper) in multiple places (say,
> a LaTeX CV and a differently formatted web listing of papers).
>
> What I wanted was a site generation tool that used YAML text files
> as a database and allowed different kinds of documents to be produced
> from the same data.  I couldn't find anything that did just what I
> wanted, so I wrote yst. By way of illustration, here are the build
> instructions for HTML and LaTeX versions of a CV, plus a web page with a
> list of papers:
>
> - url: cv.html
>  title: CV
>  template: cv.st
>  data_common:  &cvdata
>    contact: from contact.yaml
>    jobsbyemployer: from jobs.yaml order by start group by employer
>    degrees: from degrees.yaml order by year desc
>    awards: from awards.yaml order by year desc group by title
>    papers: from papers.yaml order by year desc where (not (type = 'review'))
>    reviews: from papers.yaml order by year desc where type = 'review'
>    talks: from talks.yaml where date < '2009-09-01' order by date desc group by title
>    dissertations: from dissertations.yaml order by role then year group by role
>    theses: from theses.yaml order by year then student
>    courses: from courses.yaml order by number group by title
>  data:
>    <<:  *cvdata
>    html: yes
>
> - url: cv.tex
>  title: CV
>  inmenu: no
>  template: cv.st
>  layout: layout.tex.st
>  data:
>    <<:  *cvdata
>    html: yes
>
> - url: papers.html
>  title: Papers
>  template: papers.st
>  data:
>    papersbyyear:  from papers.yaml order by year desc then title group by year
>
> yst's query language is limited, and there are lots of things you can
> do with a full-fledged database that you can't do with yst. But yst
> is ideal, I think, for small to medium data-driven sites that are
> maintained by a single person who likes working with plain text. It
> scratched my itch, anyway, and I release it in case anyone else has the
> same itch.
>
> Code, documentation, and bug reports:  http://github.com/jgm/yst/tree/master
>
> John
>
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-- 
jinjing