HPR1203: templer: a static html generator

In today's show Chess talks to us about a static html generator written in perl called templer

• https://github.com/skx/templer
• https://www.steve.org.uk/

Templer

Templer is yet another static site generator, written in Perl.

It makes use of the HTML::Template module for performing variable expansion within pages and layouts, along with looping and conditional-statement handling.

Templer has evolved over time for my own personal use, but I believe it is sufficiently generic it could be useful to others.

My motivation for putting it together came from the desire to change several hand-made, HTML-coded, sites to something more maintainable such that I could easily change the layout in one place.

The design evolved over time but the key reason for keeping it around is that it differs from many other simple static-generators in several ways:

• You may define global variables for use in your pages/layouts.
• A page may define and use page-specific variables.
• You may change the layout on a per-page basis if you so wish.
  • This was something that is missing from a lot of competing tools.
• Conditional variable expansion is supported, via HTML::Template.
• File contents, shell commands, and file-globs may be used in the templates
  • This allows the trivial creation of galleries, for example.
  • These are implemented via plugins.
• You may also embed perl code in your pages.

Another key point is that the layouts allow for more than a single simple "content" block to be placed into them - you can add arbitrary numbers of optional side-menus, for example.

Although this tool was written and used with the intent you'd write your site-content in HTML you can write your input pages in Textile or Markdown if you prefer (these inputs are supported via plugins).

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