Documentation: What is the difference between templates and template?

[jonschlinkert]

Documentation: What is the difference between templates and template?

[jonschlinkert]

I apologize if the questions are dumb

these are all good questions, no worries at all. I'll start with the heading..

What is the difference between templates and template?

it's nothing complicated. I'm in the process of fixing some things I think I did wrong before. We just received the name templates, so we're moving template over to templates. Then we're going to use templates in assemble and refactor template to be mostly what's in this file. After that's done, templates will use template to handle the View class.

Bottom line, the names will be more semantically correct:

• templates manages template collections
• template is (will be) a single template

but the project (assemble) seems to be sleeping for a while and for that reason I was looking for the next big thing in static site generation.

If you take a look at assemble's branches, dev specifically, there have been 725 commits to assemble since the last minor version change. assemble/assemble#767

Is it much more than a grunt-plugin calling template and selecting a template engine (handlebars)?

As of 0.6, Assemble is a 100% standalone library. No longer a grunt plugin, but we will continue to provide support for grunt with grunt-assemble.

how much value assemble provides compared to templates.

Value is in the eye of the beholder :) but I'll try to sum up the major differences:

Templates

Main purpose: Template collections and rendering

• creates views
• creates and manages custom view collections
• engine selection
• routes
• compiling and rendering

templates expects you to read and write your own files. There is no concept of src, dest, tasks etc.

Assemble

Main purpose: Building projects (static sites, rapid prototyping)

• manages and runs tasks
• src, dest and copy, for reading and writing files
• adds higher level processing to simplify site generation and rapid prototyping, like automatically calculating relative paths for dest files

I was looking for the next big thing in static site generation

Keep watching the dev branch on Assemble :) we're about to release some things that will be game changing.

Does this help?

[jonschlinkert]

btw I'll be sure to get these things clarified on the docs of all related libs as well. I think it will be more obvious when it's all done.

[hgoebl]

Thnx @jonschlinkert, this really helps and I'm looking forward to see assemble 0.6.
Do you think it's already time to give it a try for a small "pilot" project?
I could migrate one of my static sites or start one of my "backlog" site projects...
Would not be a problem when changes occur later 😨

[jonschlinkert]

Do you think it's already time to give it a try for a small "pilot" project?

yeah, I think if you use the dev branch it should be okay. Docs are in progress though, so you might need to figure things out until then. We don't anticipate any major API changes happening on 0.6, just bug fixes

[hgoebl]

Thanks again, I'll give it a try soon.