## About webgen
webgen is a tool to generate static websites by combining content
with template files. You create one or more template files in which
you define the layout of your page and where the content should go.
After that you create page files in which you only define the
content. You can use a variety of markup languages like Textile or
Markdown or Haml to define your content and you can add dynamic parts
via ERB or by using webgen tags. This allows the automatic generation
of menus, breadcrumb trails and much more!
Homepage for installation instructions and documentation:
http://webgen.rubyforge.org/documentation/
## webgen 1.0.0
It has been long since the last version of the 0.5.x series, more than
three years. If you thought that development on webgen halted you were
wrong.
With the two beta releases at the end of last year most of the major
remaining bugs of this complete rewrite were fixed and the only big job
was to update the webgen website. This took me longer than expected but
during the update of the website, including all of the documentation,
webgen was actively used and in the process I uncovered some more
problems which are now fixed, too.
So without further ado I present you **webgen 1.0.0**!
Why would you want to use it? Here are some reasons:
* The basic promise of webgen didn't change. It still allows one
without knowledege of a programming language to easily create and
generate a website, built from templates and content files. However,
the one-oh-oh version now uses the latest libraries to do its job and
is up-to-date in all regards.
* **Better CLI commands**: The webgen CLI now provides more tools for
working with a website. Aside from the usual things like creating a
new website and generating the output, it can show the available
extension bundles, all available extensions, the configuration
options (including documentation, syntax and examples), the generated
node tree (including meta information) and node dependencies.
With the addition of the **dry run mode**, you can preview what
webgen would do without actually changing anything in the destination
directory. Combine this with the destination.show_changes
configuration option to see the actual changes that would be done!
* **Better partial site generation**: The whole core of webgen was
ripped apart and re-implemented to make it easier to add dependent
items to a node and the whole system got faster. It is now easier
than ever to write an extension that handles a new type of item.
Additionally, the webgen CLI can now show the items on which a node
depends so that you can see at a glance why a node might get
re-generated.
* **Node search API**: Many extensions need to generate a possibly
nested list of nodes (for example, the tag menu or the path
handler feed). Prior to webgen 1.0.0 each of these extensions had to
do the work themselves. With this new version, the node_finder
extension provides a mechanism to do this in a standardized way. You
just provide it with a set of options that defines the nodes that you
want and it does all the rest!
* **Many built-in extensions**: All built-in extensions that were
available in 0.5.x are also available in the 1.0.0 version, plus some
more. And if you are missing some extension, it is now *very easy to
create new extensions*; you can even publish them as gems to make
them easily available and installable to other users.
Here are two of the new extensions:
* The misc.dummy_index extension automatically generates directory
index files that are missing.
* The path_handler.api extension uses RDoc to create Ruby API
documentation files that have the same look and feel as the rest of
the website. No longer is it necessary to generate the API
documentation separately!
There are also some extension bundles available as Rubygems, they
follow the naming scheme `webgen-...-bundle`.
You can find the full documentation of webgen on the webgen website at
<http://webgen.rubyforge.org> For information on how to upgrade a
webgen 0.5.x website to this new version, have a look at the upgrade
documentation.
Cheers,
Thomas