I've been tasked at work to create a 'website' on a CD for a client. I've made a start where basically everything is hardcoded pure html, and god how easily you forget how amazing templates are, so much freakin' boilerplate. So I would prefer to somehow create a set of linked html pages using a template system.
Is there some method of easily producing a set of linked html files (suitable for CD, i.e. no webserver) using something like Django? The project is doable by hand, but there's a lot of overhead.
Would love to hear alternative ideas as well, not set on Django, just what I'm kind of familiar with.
Note: Can't include any software, can't use anything from the internet. Flat html, on the cd.
You might be interested in a static-site generator like Hyde (Python) or Jekyll (Ruby). Essentially lets you create pages in Markdown/Textile/whatever with templates, and then generate static HTML files with a simple shell command. You can deploy it however you want, since it's just files.
I've used Jekyll myself because I heard about it first (despite being a Python guy primarily), but Hyde seems a bit more competent (CSS processors, for example). Jekyll is more widely used, I think.
(Using Django would mean that you'd have to run a Django installation on some server just to create the content and then generate "linked html files"...)
Here is another approach: http://lethain.com/intricate-static-websites-with-django-templates/
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I'm building my own blog and I would have lots of articles, so, copying and pasting the head every time, or an aside, the footer or some repeated parts of the blog would be stupid.
So, I'm looking a way to do it in an easy way. I heared about templating (but don't know what it is) and found this answer: Is it possible to create a web site header without copying and pasting it on every page? but it seems that is not what I'm looking for.
I heared about HAML and Markdown (HTML Preprocessors) and don't know if they are used to do what I need.
The solution I want to find is something like #import in Sass.
I have an #import "head.scss"; and in the compiled file I hadn't repeated manualy the (in this case an "imported module" head.scss)
I might say I'm learning to develop my static blog with Jekyll, just because I want to learn to use this technology, and second I know how to use WordPress, Joomla and learning a new thing would be interesting for me but I don't want to learn PHP so I think a templating language will be easier for this project
If you want to use Jekyll, you can use includes to avoid repeating code.
If You are looking easier ways for managing posts and front matter You should look into Jekyll Bash UI or Octopress.
If You want to learn more about Jekyll and its templating system, I'd recommend You to read the Jeyll.tips web page. It contains well formatted and easy to read how-tos, and also covers advanced topics like data files and collections.
Jekyll Bash UI (requires Bash)
Creating a new post is quite easy process, just this on the command line:
jcli.sh new
Octopress
Octopress uses rake utility which makes using Jekyll easier.
For creating a post You just have to call this:
rake new_post["My new post with Octopress"].
After this You can call rake generate to generate the page or rake preview to run the webserver at localhost on port 4000, so You can preview the changes.
The answer is yes it's possible.
In order for a scss file to work you have to make sure the .scss file (or sass file) is converted to css first. (you can look up the many sass tutorials online. for that, just look for converting sass or scss files into css there are even little simple applications for that like scout) By the way, with less you can do the same thing for css files as with sass in terms of importing.
For html files there are templating engines like you said. You can compare popular ones like moustache, dust.js and handlebars just to name a few.
With these you can import snippets of html code inside your file (so you do not have to repeat code).
In programming languages like JavaScript and php you can also do the same thing.
in PHP you can use for example the include() or require() function to import other bits of code from other files into your current file. And in languages like JavaScript you can even use something like angular for example to create simple custom directives to achieve the same goal.
Pretty much every server side language I've worked with has shared views in some manner or another.
asp.net webforms has master pages, asp.net mvc has shared views, coldfusion has cfinclude, RoR has partials, PHP has shared layout. I don't know about straight up HTML, but when utilizing a server side language this is definitely possible.
I would suggest using a content management system, like WordPress (https://wordpress.com/) , Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/), or Drupal (https://www.drupal.org/). You create a template one time and load it into the CMS. You can then create as many pages as you need without having copy and paste the template. You can also add in different elements as needed. This makes managing a blog much easier.
If you dead set on doing it one page at a time, I would suggest using PHP to pull in the header. Here is a good article to get you started, Creating a PHP header/footer . However, you'll still need to copy and paste a template file to create a new page.
I'm working with two students to produce a few HTML pages (a homepage and two secondary page layouts) that will later be implemented into a larger CMS.
I'd like to be able to abstract the shared HTML (head metadata, primary navigation, footer, etc.) into separate files so we only have to update them in a single place, execute a shell command to generate new, complete output. Since these pages are only ever going to become templates for another team, I don't even need to integrate any external data sources.
I know Jade would work for this but our partials/layouts/whatever need to look like HTML. I keep coming back to precompiling Handlebars templates but I'm not having much luck getting them to work.
Since we're using Foundation 5, Ruby and Node are already part of our toolchain. Suggestions?
I really like Middleman for this kind of thing. Layouts and partials and local data, etc. Wonderfully useful for doing front-end prototyping for what will eventually become a Rails application.
I was wondering what programming/markup languages does Diveintohtml5.info use. I am planning to create an online book(on some math stuff) similar to that of Mark Pilgrims' but need to know what exactly he used to create them.
Did he use a CMS like wordpress? Or it's just plain old HTML and CSS?
I am a bit new to the world of web development. Be kind.
Thanks in advance
Looking at the book’s source code on GitHub, it seems to be mostly static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, it uses Python, Java, and shell code too, as you can see in the Makefile. (Makefiles are run with make.)
The Makefile contains a lot of shell code doing things like substitution, file copying, and concatenation. It also calls the Python and Java code, which is all in the util folder. The Python and Java programs compress the HTML and CSS, build the table of contents from the headings in each file, and do a few other things.
I have a large pile of lecture notes in raw HTML format. I would like to add interactive content to these notes, in particular incorporating online exercises. I have some experience implementing online exercises as cgi-bin executables compiled from Haskell code running on the server, interacting with a student record file and sending suitable HTML back to the browser, using Text.Xhtml to generate the content. Now I plan to integrate the notes and the exercises.
The trouble is that I don't want to spend ages manually transforming my raw HTML into Haskell code to generate exactly the raw HTML I started with. Instead, I'd like to put my Haskell code and my HTML in the same source file, with placeholders in the latter for content generated by the former. A suitable tool should then transform this file into Haskell source code for (e.g.) a cgi-bin executable which generates the corresponding page.
Before I go hacking up such a piece of kit, I thought I'd ask if there's better technology out there already. The fixed points are the large legacy lump of HTML, the need to implement the assessment of the exercises in Haskell, and the need to interact with student records on the server. The handicap is that I need to use the departmental web server and I can't reconfigure it (ok, maybe I could ask nicely): that's one of the reasons I currently use cgi-bin executables, which are just fine on our server already, but I'm open to other possibilities.
My current plan is to write a (I mean adapt an existing) preprocessor to support a special syntax for defining functions of type
Html -> ... -> Html -> Html
that looks a lot like raw HTML with splice points. Then what I do with my existing raw HTML is indent it a bit and mark the holes.
But would that be a waste of time? Please, please tell me that this question is a duplicate!
There are Haskell frameworks like Yesod and Happstack which use templating engines like you describe.
Have you looked at the haskell wiki at http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/HSP or
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Web/Libraries/Templating ?
They may do what you need.
You might find someting to do the job here: Templating packages for Haskell.
And you should probably look into Snap, Yesod or Happstack for serving the content.
I have a large pile of lecture notes in raw HTML format. I would like to add interactive content to these notes, in particular incorporating online exercises.
There is already a system (called "ActiveHs"), written in Haskell, that allows to put lecture notes and interactive exercises in one file.
See:
http://pnyf.inf.elte.hu/fp/UsersGuide_en.xml
http://pnyf.inf.elte.hu/fp/Constructive_en.xml
I can really say that it is very well written code and completely open source!
I'm working on automating our company invoicing system. Currently all data is stored in our local MySQL database and someone manually updates an excel spreadsheet and then merges this data into a MS Word template. The goal is to automate this process so that the invoice can be generated from our intranet website as a PDF.
My original plan was to create a template in HTML/CSS and use wkhtmltopdf to generate the PDF but I ran into problems with getting a repeatable header and footer on each page. thead and tfoot aren't supported by Webkit and the fix suggested in this other question does not seem to work either.
So I then stumbled on using XML and XSL-FO, the latter I know nothing about. Is this the best path to take? Are there any libraries or utilities out there that will make converting my HTML+CSS into XML+XSL-FO easier? Are there any other alternatives I'm overlooking?
EDIT
Currently the server is CentOS Linux with a MySQL database. All other code is currently in PHP currently but that may change as the whole system is being revamped. Linux and MySQL will almost certainly remain, though.
For your requirement, XSL-FO might just do the trick. It is much cleaner to produce the pdf's directly from the data, then going the cumbersome html path, unless you need to display the html as well, then you might consider converting from html to pdf, but it will always be messy.
You can get xml results from mysql quite easily (mysql --xml) and then you write one (or several) xsl-fo stylesheet for the data. then, you cannot only produce pdfs, but also postscript files or rtf's with some processors.
XSL-FO has its limitations tho, but for your situation, it should suffice.
I admit, the learning curve can be steep, and maintaining xslt-stylesheets can get very tiring, but as you start knowing more about it, you end up writing less code.
another possibility is to do the whole thing in e.g. java or c# - send select statements and loop the results and iteratively build the pdf using a library like iText.
You could try JODReports or Docmosis as less-code intensive options. You supply Word or OpenOffice Writer documents to act as templates and use these engines to manipulate/populate the templates then spit out the documents in the format(s) you require. This may mean your existing Word-templates can be used directly which should save you some effort/time.
iText is another library that will let you build and pump out PDFs from code. It's pretty good.
If you cloud use ASP.NET for web you can use free ReportViewer library and designer for automated of publishing PDF-s.
Here is some references:
http://gotreportviewer.com
http://weblogs.asp.net/srkirkland/archive/2007/10/29/exporting-a-sql-server-reporting-services-2005-report-directly-to-pdf-or-excel.aspx
If you're OK using .NET and C#, you could use DotPdf from Atalasoft (obligatory disclaimer: I work for Atalasoft and wrote most of DotPdf). The Generating namespace is geared for exactly what you're trying to do: automate report generation. From the very basics, you could just create docs directly with the toolkit or you can create template documents that have unpopulated text fields that you can reload and fill later (see here and here for examples).