## 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).