Scalability. That’s the bugger – especially with sites that start out small and simple. After a while, they grow and end up not so simple. Which is why I’m trying to convert my personal site over to use a template based pre-processing system to generate the static site prior to upload.
So far the one I’ve settled on is tt2site. (Reasons: it’s easy to install and it looked simpler than WML.) Now if I can only figure it out: the features are plenty but the documents few, and Google’s no help either.
The main problem is that there is little explanation of operation. Sure, I can figure out how to run the final generation command. That’s easy. But how do I set up templates exactly? (I don’t know how Perl’s template thing works, and why should I? Tell me.) What exactly do all these config files do? Providing example configs is great – how do they work? I don’t know. Tutorials would be nice. Start here. Do this, and why. See what happens? Great, now if you want to change it, do this. Cool, you just made a simple site! Now, add this file structure. Ok, in order to set up the menu things you need this config file, this is how the options work, this is how it will interpret that file structure.
I need more detail, a little bit of hand holding. I guess I’ll just have to do a lot of poking and write my own Tutorial. Grokking someone else’s creation is always so much harder than using something you thought up. If anyone wants to help, by all means – leave a comment or drop me an email.
The Brushpile 