RoR tools for managing static websites?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Are there Ruby tools to help webmasters manage static websites?

I'm talking about regenerating an entire static website - all the HTML files in their appropriate directories and sub-directories. Each page has some fixed parts (navigation menu, header, footer) and some changing parts (body content, though in specific cases the normally fixed parts might change as well). The tool should help to keep site editing DRY every piece of data, including the recurring parts, should exist only once.

The above should be doable with any decent templating tool, such as those forming part of most CMSes and full-stack web-frameworks. Normally I might have just resorted to a CMS/web-framework, running locally on the webmaster's station, with the only addition being a mechanism for generating all pages composing the site and saving them as files.

But such a solution might not be enough, as the system I'm looking for must be able to control the physical traits of the website as a collection of files - e.g., creation and distribution of files among several physical directories and subdirectories.

Any advice would be appreciated, -Chris

2

Hi chris,

I think you can get the results you want with rails, but not in the way you want to get them. It seems like you're wanting to set things up like you would using, say, php and smarty. If you were to do this in rails, any completely static page could be served as that. Any part-static part-dynamic page would be handled using a standard controller action with one of rails' caching options.

That said, sometimes rails is overkill. Sometimes we want to force it on a problem it isn't suited for.

Best of luck Starr