I’m very fond of static website generators–they’re a lot faster than interpreted (php, ruby) or even most compiled (Java) based solutions. I’m using Octopress to manage this blog currently, it’s basically a set of customizations, style files, and build scripts that extend the capabilities of Jeckyll, a comprehensive platform in its own right. I’ve also tried out the node.js based Docpad and the pythonic Hyde and Pelican.
While these all do a fairly good job of managing a standard blogging sites, in my opinion they all suffer from trying to do a bit too much, to manage the whole job of website creation, which makes it difficult to decouple small, specific bits of functionality, like rendering just a few web pages from templates. Also, I never really got into the Jinja2 templating language: I don’t like the way that it (doesn’t) handle inline code, or the fact that every call to a macro has to be in the form of a block, or that every macro definition needs to do something with the content included in the block, even if you didn’t want to use that feature. I much prefer the style of Mako, but none of the popular static website generators seem to support it.
For the Department’s digital sign project, I just needed something that would rending a single, but fairly complicated, web page in a way that would be easy for me to customize, and I didn’t want to deal with the overhead of a lot of features aimed at things like blogging that I never intended to use. My first thought was to hack something together with Make and the mako-render script that came packaged with Ubuntu, but whereas the static website generators did more than I wanted, this seemed a little too simple. So, naturally, I decided to hack together something on my own.