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Untitled-Website-Engine Documentation

The goal of this project is to make it easy to maintain a website with posts in a chronological order. It borrows from various UNIX philosophies as a core tenant:

Portability over efficiency

Html + css are relatively easy to read by both humans and machines; it's been a well understood standard for decades. It will be the end result of any kind of templating engine; this project chooses to use them directly instead of any higher level abstractions. This decision is to make it easy to translate to a different language backend and keep your textual post data portable. Manual reconstruction of dist from the html/css inputs should be understandable.

Directory Structure Overview

  • build/ - the output of the typescript compiler
  • dist/ - the website output from running the built script. Host/share this
  • docs/ - you are here
  • partials/ - common html that can be used as templates in the views
  • posts/ - where you will write your posts. Directory structure should match views/
  • public/ - store static assets like images here, they will be copied to dist/
  • src/ - the typescript source of the website engine
  • styles/ - the css source of your website. Ensure filenames are ordered as they are concatenated
  • views/ - the html route structure that will have content filled in
    • views/*/index.html - an end route the user will visit, often an index of posts
    • views/*/_content.html - if there are matching files in posts/*/ they will use this template

Environment Variables

  • BASE_URL (default /) use this if you aren't hosting this at the root directory. ex: BASE_URL=/Untitled-Website-Engine/ npm run build

Templating

To keep things productive but understandable, this project does need a few abstractions. Their scope is to be minimal and understandable.

Directory Structure

The views/ directory can be arbitrarily nested and structured as you like. The root index.html is the root index.html output. Within a nested structure you will generally have index.html files and _content.html files.

_content.html is a special template file that will be used when reading from the posts/ directory under a matching structure. This file must contain the following comment which will be replaced with the post content:

<!--# content #-->

Example directory:

views
├── blog
│   ├── _content.html
│   └── index.html
├── index.html
└── reviews
    ├── _content.html
    └── index.html

posts
├── blog
│   ├── 2019-12-28-some-story.html
│   └── 2019-12-31-example.html
└── reviews
    ├── 2019-11-01-some-movie.html
    └── 2019-12-01-some-tv-show.html

Will output the following

dist
├── blog
│   ├── 2019-12-28-some-story
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── 2019-12-31-example
│   │   └── index.html
│   └── index.html
├── index.html
├── reviews
│   ├── 2019-11-01-some-movie
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── 2019-12-01-some-tv-show
│   │   └── index.html
│   └── index.html
└── style.css

Partials

You can put commonly used html inside files in the partials directory. You can then use these in your html files in views via a specially formatted comment with matching directory structure.

<!--! partials/head.html !-->

Index list

In the index.html file beside a _content.html file you can use the following comment to generate a list

<!--# index #-->

will be replaced with something like:

<ul>
  <li>
    <a href="/blog/2019-12-31-example">2019/12/31 - Example Blog Post</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="/blog/2019-12-28-some-story">2019/12/28 some story</a>
  </li>
</ul>