norm/flourish

Yet another static site generator

Flourish

Flourish is a static website generator. It can be used to create a blog or journal, a photo gallery, a portfolio, documentation, and any other kind of website — as long as the pages should always be the same no matter when, who, how, or what, is viewing them.

By separating your content ("source") from the HTML ("template"), you can focus more on the adding of new content than on the act of wrangling web pages. Further, because your content can be written in Markdown rather than HTML, you can concentrate on just your content, on just your words, and let the website take care of itself.

It is designed around the ideas that:

• only combining your content with predefined themes is limiting for any site but the most basic
• plugins are stop-gap solution and often don't work the way you want, making you change your pages and designs to fit the plugin
• if you have specific requirements on how the site should work, you should not be held back

Whilst being perfectly useful for non-programmers, Flourish really shines in the hands of developers who can write python. It can create almost any content, and be setup to create webpages in almost any way.

It is heavily inspired by django's class based views and James Aylett's django file-backed objects.

Quick start

Flourish is installable from pypi.

pip install flourish
mkdir example
cd example
flourish example

Documentation

The Flourish documentation is available on Read the Docs.

There is also a (very quiet and empty) Slack for users of Flourish.

TODOs

Outstanding work is mostly kept in GitHub Issues (or as FIXMEs and TODOs in the code where I've been lazy, or they don't introduce new features).

Things that will be added in the near future are listed in Issues, tagged with the 1.0 milestone.

Things that will be added in the longer term are listed in Issues, tagged with the 2.0 milestone.

Things I'll probably never get around to are listed in Issues, tagged Pie in the Sky.

Anything in Issues without a milestone is probably a bug reported by lovely people trying to improve Flourish.

flourish's Issues

Support Textile sources

Support python 3

Currently Flourish is written for python 2 because it is still the default python on many operating systems (especially OS X where it is developed). Making it also compatible with python 3 is desirable.

Support more types of datetime in sources

Currently only YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ is supported natively in TOML.

This may mean fixing/forking the python TOML library.

Add 301, 302, 404 and 410 responses to the server

Through some (as yet undetermined) method, support adding 301 Moved Permanently, 302 Found, 404 Not Found, and 410 Gone HTTP statuses to the server.

301s and 404s should be replicated when uploading to S3. The other codes are not supported.

Provide a `{% url ... %}` function in templates

URLs have symbolic names so they can be referred to indirectly, with an expectation of using this in templates (much like Django does), rather than hardcoding URLs.

Document how to add interactivity to the Flourish production server

For example: to support search and adding comments to blogs.

Create withaflourish.net as an example of a Flourish website

Create a new, default blog

Publishing a blog is a very common use of Flourish, so the command-line tool should be able to set up a new blog with sensible default templates and a generate script.

Support AsciiDoc sources

Document how to setup S3 for hosting a website

Should be mostly linking to other documentation.

Include how to setup CloudFront and Lets Encrypt for HTTPS.

Alternatively, think about adding it to the command line, eg flourish setup s3.

Create a production Flask server for Flourish sites

This can support the full range of HTTP status codes (see #10).

Create `sectile` style template includes

Rather than the standard {% extends ... %} provided by Jinja2, allow subtemplates to be included in a sectile manner, using the slug and other factors to determine the dimensions used.

(nb. this will make no sense to anyone other than me, as sectile is a piece of software I never released)

Support reStructuredText sources

Stop the preview server exploding so readily

Errors in source files, templates and the generate script can cause the preview server to explode. It should be more robust, and where it does explode, the flourish server process should exit so it is clearer that the user needs to restart it manually.