What is Silkweave?

Silkweave is a tiny framework for creating a Web site out of a file tree with the help of templates. It takes a directory full of your desired site's content as input and produces the Web site as output. All the content and structure of the Web site is determined from the content and structure of the file tree by way of a clear and simple mapping. While this might sound like what any common Web server will do with a file tree, the use of templates means that you Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY).

What's It Like To Use Silkweave?

1. Creating an initial skeleton for the site:
   silkweave init ~/example.com
2. Editing the front page:
   cd ~/example.com/pages
vim @title @content
3. Making a new page:
   mkdir ~/example.com/pages/something
cd ~/example.com/pages/something
vim @title @content
4. Editing the relevant template:
   vim ~/example.com/templates/plain_page.haml
5. Serving the site dynamically:
   rackup ~/example.com/config.ru
6. Generating the site as a set of static files:
   silkweave make-static -r ~/example.com/pages

Why Use Silkweave?

Silkweave is designed for creating sites that might otherwise be created with a CMS, but without the complexity of deploying and managing a CMS and its nearly inevitable database. The user interface for creating a Web site with Silkweave is exactly the interface a user normally uses to edit and otherwise manipulate text files in a filesystem. This allows a Web site author to leverage the vast array of file and text manipulation tools that every computer user uses.

It works primarily by helping an author factor out HTML code that is common to multiple Web pages through the use of templates (and layouts and partials). All content that is particular to a single page is "woven" together with any content that is shared between pages. The use of a powerful template language with pertinent helper functions also facilitates the automatic generation of pages that reuse content that properly belongs to other pages. Such template programming can be used to create a menu for navigating the site's page heirarchy or a blog-style list of summaries of other pages.

Silkweave's greatest source of power and flexibility comes from its concept of page types. When one page has a different type than another page, it can be rendered with a different template, its data might be organized differently, and it can exhibit different behavior by responding to different methods within template code. With the right customizations, you can even produce pages in formats other than HTML. Silkweave comes with a variety of general-purpose page types out of the box, and you can easily add more types of your own design to suit your own site's special needs. Page types can inherit from each other, allowing you to reuse the template or other functionality from another page type.

Who Should Use Silkweave?

Silkweave is intended for people who aren't afraid of writing code to create a web site. To write and edit content for web pages, you'll just need to know enough HTML (or Markdown or Textile or something similar) to format your content. To control the structure and design of a site, you'll need to have a moderate knowledge of HTML and enough knowledge of Ruby programming to call methods on objects. To exploit the full range of Silkweave's customization capabilities, you'll need to know the basics of writing classes in the Ruby programming language.

How Do I Get Silkweave?

You can download the most recent snapshot from GitHub, either by cloning the source repository or by downloading an archive file. After you have the source, you can use the included gemspec file to build and subsequently install Silkweave with RubyGems. (Hint: gem build silkweave.gemspec && sudo gem install -l silkweave*.gem) After I'm sufficiently satisfied with the state of Silkweave to submit it to the scrutiny of a sizable society, I'll make the installation as simple as "gem install silkweave".

Status

Silkweave should be considered experimental software in the sense that its interfaces are not yet guaranteed not to change: I might still judge certain interfaces to be inadequate for Silkweave's intended uses.

Legal Notice

Silkweave was written in 2010-2012 by Daniel Jacob Pearson daniel@nanoo.org.

To the extent possible under law, the author has dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to the public domain worldwide. This software is distributed without any warranty.

You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication along with this software in a file called COPYING.txt. If not, see http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.