Soupault: A static website management tool

by yownv • 2 years ago

130 36 2 years ago

wonger_2• 2 years ago

I'm using soupault right now to make a simple company wiki (under a dozen pages). I like how it's HTML-first and easily customizable, compared to other static site generators that come with too many bells and whistles. Although now I have to make my own image compression script...

Also, fun fact: soupault is written in OCaml, which apparently has a really nice library for HTML manipulation: https://github.com/aantron/lambdasoup

Brajeshwar• 2 years ago

Honestly, I could not get to a point of clarity on What does this exactly do. I went through the website's landing page and looks pretty rock solid. But this seems to be trying to do too many things in a pretty complex way for a small and simple output. I want to like this, and I think this can help me with some of my mundane chores and focus on the content but I just cannot quite grasp it.

Can someone, please, do a "This" is the typical problem we face with HTML in Static Site Generators and "this" does "something" to solve that?

wonger_2• 2 years ago

I agree that the advantages are not clear. Maybe this table of comparisons should go on the landing page: https://soupault.app/tips-and-tricks/comparison/

Most SSGs force a blog-oriented directory structure like assets/ static/ theme/ posts/ public/. But soupault only needs an input/ and output/.

Most SSGs convert markdown to HTML. But soupault is good at processing (or ignoring) any sort of source content, which is nice for excluding one-off pages, or parsing non-markdown, or using existing HTML content.

Tomte• 2 years ago

For me what‘s standing out is getting rid of frontmatter. The title is extracted from <title>, for example. Have a look at the widgets section of the reference manual, it‘s really cool what they do.

dmbaturin2• 2 years ago

I was wondering if that part should have been the main page slogan: "Soupault’s DOM manipulation is as powerful as client-side JavaScript (without interactivity, of course), but the result is a static page."

Maybe this table of comparisons should go on the landing page

The elephant in the room is that none of the popular tools' websites make any sense to people who aren't already familiar with that class of tools. I happened to accidentally come up with a tool that's too unlike anything else to be easy to explain by "it's like {alreadyPopularTool} but with {importantDifference}".

I also hope that people from the Web 1.0 revivalist circles who hate typical SSGs for their hostility to handwritten HTML on board, although that development was ironic: the reason I included the HTML post-processor mode was to help those folks inject consistent navigation into otherwise handwritten pages or similar — in reality they just told me they were _proud_ of wasting their time on that completely automatable task, but the post-processor mode was a surprise hit with people who wanted to fix up outputs of inflexible HTML generators.

The comparison table is not very helpful for people who might not have seen an SSG before, placing it on the main page might create a confrontational tone (because it's focused on things that soupault made possible compared to other tools), and I'd have to constantly watch those projects to see if anything is no longer true.

For example, it would be pretty easy to allow Hugo call AsciiDoc and other external processes with custom CLI options — I'm sure someone will eventually do it and it will be a big improvement for those who want to use Hugo.

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

If you are already familiar with other static site generators, check out the comparison with Hugo, Zola, and Jekyll. [1] You may also want to read the FAQ. [2]

[1] https://soupault.app/tips-and-tricks/comparison/

[2] https://soupault.app/tips-and-tricks/faq/

njrc92• 2 years ago

It was a little difficult to wrap my head around at first, but for me its main benefit is this:

In many static site generators, if there is a page in a collection of pages (say, a product page) that you want to add a custom layout to (but without affecting other pages in that collection), you often need to create a separate template, or modify the default template to allow for this exception. With Soupault, page content is typically written in HTML and giving a specific page a custom layout is as simple as including an <html> element in that page’s content file and it will be treated as a completely standalone page. In other words, a content file is not as different from a template as in typical static site generators.

This flexibility and HTML-first approach cuts down on complex or sprawling templates introduced to deal with many exceptions. And as a result, someone only needs to know HTML to make most edits to a website. Of course, you can make certain patterns more efficient with “widgets” (basically snippets to insert content dynamically) defined in the main configuration file, but it is not requisite.

At the end of the day, the website is mostly just HTML with a simple project directory structure, which makes it understandable to a wider audience, which is important to me since I want the website to be easily understandable for future maintainers of it.

Edit: Another benefit is that Soupault is a single statically-linked executable with no dependencies, and therefore can be downloaded via a simple link. This also extends the longevity of websites built with it (i.e. it is easy to get the development environment setup).

j-a-a-p• 2 years ago

Edit: Another benefit is that Soupault is a single statically-linked executable with no dependencies, and therefore can be downloaded via a simple link.

My single executable is called 'docker' for these kind of tools. No need to download anything at all.

dmje• 2 years ago

I'm gunna be honest: I'm in this court ("why?" "what problem does this solve?") with, well, the whole SSG thing.

I get why people want to write their content in Markdown (well, specifically, I get why tech people want to write their content in Markdown, but not normal humans who almost always want a WYSIWYG) - but what I just can't get my head around is the vast complexity that almost all these tools seem to bring to the table.

I've looked at it for so long now I think I've basically got a terrible mental block - for most scenarios, I just don't get it. I don't see what the problem is that is being solved. Booting up a bunch of HTML files, or a simple WordPress site, or a manually built PHP thing that pulls Markdown files and uses a couple of includes to solve the "how do we replicate menus?" question - this makes sense to me.

I'm not talking about this tool (like you I have no idea what it actually does) but the whole Hugo/Gatsby/Jekyll/etc thing. Having (what looks like!) a steep learning curve, then a whole bunch of build steps, lots of dependencies, frameworks, templates etc etc - in order to get what is being sold here as the end game (a fast, dependency free, "just html", no risk website) just feels like ...madness.

I badly need someone to explain to me why all these tools are doing something better. That's a serious request, btw, would love for someone to enlighten me!

dflock• 2 years ago

The tools (mostly) all start out simple, as you described. Then they start to get traction and users. More users equals more diverse use cases and feature requests. Each individual request makes sense, for that group of users, and is implemented. Slowly the software grows in complexity, until you have Hugo etc... Then people say it's too complex and start over - and it all happens again.

This applies to all software - and most other things that humans make that have large numbers of users, like governments, countries, or other systems.

getwiththeprog• 2 years ago

While I write HTML by hand, and see no need for soupault, the chance to raise awareness for pataphysics is rather tempting...

mikae14• 2 years ago

Do you write RSS feeds by hand too?

BossingAround• 2 years ago

RSS feeds are easily scriptable

lurn_mor• 2 years ago

Actually, I do. Why would I do it differently than the HTML I just authored?

WaitWaitWha• 2 years ago

This may sound counter intuitive, but I am befuddled with all these static site generators always CLI. Yet, I delight in static sites.

Why is are all static site generators (that I am aware of) are CLI? What prevent simplistic drag and drop GUI/WYSIWYG that generates those clean static files?

All the static generators I have tested are way over-complicated for the "general public", yet I think static sites are probably the best option for most sites.

mikae14• 2 years ago

Try https://getpublii.com

lecarore• 2 years ago

I've set this up for my parents, they have a small bed and breakfast in the countryside, and they love it. It's much more responsive then their past WordPress install when editing, because their desktop is faster than a cheap PHP hosting. Some things are needlessly complicated in publii though, I'd like to make a more minimal version one day

_xivi• 2 years ago

Why is are all static site generators (that I am aware of) are CLI? What prevent simplistic drag and drop GUI/WYSIWYG that generates those clean static files?

Check:

- Tina CMS: https://tina.io/

- Primo CMS: https://primocms.org/

More generally, try looking for `git-based cms` or `CMS+SSG`, you'll find a diverse set of solutions.

Anyway, you had it in reverse. Static generation is the easy part, while what you're looking for is a subset category of CMSs. So you should be looking under the CMS umbrella. You can also setup any generic Headless CMS to trigger generation for a static site. There's not much incentive to build a full fledged CMS, only to clip its wings and limit it to "static site only".

redeux• 2 years ago

I agree with you. There’s even an ecosystem of plugins for WordPress that will generate static assets from your site.

WhyNotHugo• 2 years ago

Ironically, the first link has setup instructions which use the cli:

    npx create-tina-app@latest

Jaxkr• 2 years ago

Anyone who wants a GUI for a static site generator would be better served by a CMS.

Static sites are really only loved in the developer community among people who think it’s crazy to run a whole backend to generate pages for unchanging blog posts.

The people who want a GUI do not think this is crazy and use WordPress or similar software.

mikae14• 2 years ago

Static sites are really only loved in the developer community

...because they usually require extensive technical know-how to achieve a rather simple thing?

Perhaps you want own your domain and website setup.

Perhaps you don't have time to be a server admin keeping a public facing CMS up to date and secure.

https://getpublii.com runs on any cheap shared hosting and is zero maintenance. Your website will also be an easy to backup directory on your computer. Static site generators can be simple and attractive to the average user.

firecall• 2 years ago

There is Rapid Weaver for the Mac!

https://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/

Im also a huge fan of Cloud Cannon. Which puts a CMS of sorts on top of static site generators.

statquontrarian• 2 years ago

Yellow is nice: https://github.com/datenstrom/yellow

tenken• 2 years ago

also php driven https://getgrav.org has a webui admin panel which can replace it's CLI admin tool chain.

mbirth• 2 years ago

For Mac or iPad/iPhone, there’s e.g. blocs - https://blocsapp.com/

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

The HN effect https://soupault.goatcounter.com/

yownv• 2 years ago

some experiment with soupault https://github.com/multidecay/soupault-digital-garden

liampulles2• 2 years ago

I think there is a parallel between an increasingly hacky/complex Jekyll/Hugo setup and a hacky/complex low-code system. These systems are good for prototyping and getting going, but there may be a certain point where it ends up being easier and more manageable to do the thing in code.

It can also be a nice side project to find a markdown/rst/etc. parser and make a site generator.

panphora• 2 years ago

I was hopelessly confused about what Soupault actually does, so I took time to understand it piece by piece and summarize it here:

1. HTML Manipulation: Unlike most SSGs that primarily generate HTML from templates and markdown, Soupault allows direct manipulation of HTML content, treating HTML as a mutable object rather than a final output.

2. External Tools Integration: Soupault automates the use of external tools for content processing and HTML modifications at build time, facilitating an array of content transformations directly on the HTML.

3. Metadata Handling: Soupault extracts metadata directly from HTML using CSS selectors, avoiding the need for front matter and offering more flexibility in content structure and metadata management.

TLDR: Basically, Soupault is a static site generator that allows for direct HTML manipulation of your sites by treating HTML as the source of truth instead of the final output.

mattlondon• 2 years ago

I don't understand - a static site generator that uses HTML for markup is ... notepad.exe?

Soupault: A static website management tool

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