Ask HN: Looking for a Static wiki generator

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4895747

by bobcattr • 14 years ago

1 11 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am looking for a simple static wiki (not blog) generator. All I really need is the static generation of markdown files to be presented in a parent child fashion. Does anything like this exist?

The reason being the host system is not powerful enough to run a wiki engine like dokuwiki

ColinWright5• 14 years ago

I'm sure people will chime in with more information here, but you might be interested in previous discussions of this and similar questions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860457

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4858436

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857473

bobcattr4• 14 years ago

I have searched before and didn't really come up with much that is a wiki. Everything is a blog

ColinWright5• 14 years ago

I produced my own statically generated wiki that uses forms, email, and a cron job to receive changes, regenerate the site, then upload the changed pages. It's crude, old, non-standard, and definitely not what you want. When I made it some 13 years ago there were no alternatives. Still runs, mind you.

So it's possible, and I'm sure someone has done it, but I have no suggestions. Sorry.

Added in edit ...

Have you had a look at this: http://code.google.com/p/statwiki/ ??

Or this: http://ikiwiki.info/ ??

Or this: https://github.com/arthurk/pyll#readme ??

This also has a lot of information:

http://iwantmyname.com/blog/2011/02/list-static-website-gene...

ColinWright5• 14 years ago

So if it's a wiki, how do you intend to make a change, given that it's static? I'd be interested to see how your solution to that design issue compares with the solution I came up with over a decade ago.

bobcattr4• 14 years ago

Through the markdown (or whatever else) files on the system via the shell.

ColinWright5• 14 years ago

I don't understand. It's a wiki. You have a collection of plain text files with markdown or something. There's a web server. The webserver expects html.

How does the text get converted to html? What provokes the process? Do you just initiate it by hand having changed the plain text files? If so, what's the difference between a wiki and a static web site?

I don't understand what you're trying to achieve, and why you're calling it a wiki.

1331• 14 years ago

It seems that the terminology is causing some confusion. The definition of a wiki is "a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser" [1], which is pretty much the opposite of "static." I assume that what you want is a static site generator that has organisational features that are common in wiki software...

My favourite wiki software is Gitit [2]. It uses Pandoc [3] to convert from an input format (such as Markdown) to HTML. Perhaps you could write a simple script that iterates through all source files and renders the HTML to a destination directory using Pandoc, creating any subdirectories as required. That minimal solution should be very easy to implement; adding organisational markup within the HTML would require some programming.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

[2] http://gitit.net/

[3] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Ask HN: Looking for a Static wiki generator

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