[Haskell-cafe] ANN: yst 0.2.1

I'm pleased to announce the release of yst, now available on HackageDB. yst generates static websites from YAML or CSV data files and StringTemplates. This approach combines the speed, security, and ease of deployment of a static website with the flexibility and maintainability of a dynamic site that separates presentation and data. The easiest way to get a feel for yst is to try it: cabal update cabal install yst yst create testsite cd testsite yst yst attempts to fill a niche between two kinds of site creation tools. On the one hand you have simple static site generators like webgen, webby, nanoc, and my old custom system using make and pandoc. On the other hand, you have dynamic web frameworks like rails and django. For my own smallish websites, I found that the dynamic frameworks were overkill. Nobody but me was going to edit the pages, and I didn't want the trouble of writing and deploying a dynamic site, setting up a web server, and administering a database. A static site would be faster, easier to deploy, and more secure. But the dynamic frameworks offered one thing that the static site generators did not: an easy way to separate data from presentation. This was becoming increasingly important to me as I found myself constantly updating the same information (say, publication data for a paper) in multiple places (say, a LaTeX CV and a differently formatted web listing of papers). What I wanted was a site generation tool that used YAML text files as a database and allowed different kinds of documents to be produced from the same data. I couldn't find anything that did just what I wanted, so I wrote yst. By way of illustration, here are the build instructions for HTML and LaTeX versions of a CV, plus a web page with a list of papers: - url: cv.html title: CV template: cv.st data_common: &cvdata contact: from contact.yaml jobsbyemployer: from jobs.yaml order by start group by employer degrees: from degrees.yaml order by year desc awards: from awards.yaml order by year desc group by title papers: from papers.yaml order by year desc where (not (type = 'review')) reviews: from papers.yaml order by year desc where type = 'review' talks: from talks.yaml where date < '2009-09-01' order by date desc group by title dissertations: from dissertations.yaml order by role then year group by role theses: from theses.yaml order by year then student courses: from courses.yaml order by number group by title data: <<: *cvdata html: yes - url: cv.tex title: CV inmenu: no template: cv.st layout: layout.tex.st data: <<: *cvdata html: yes - url: papers.html title: Papers template: papers.st data: papersbyyear: from papers.yaml order by year desc then title group by year yst's query language is limited, and there are lots of things you can do with a full-fledged database that you can't do with yst. But yst is ideal, I think, for small to medium data-driven sites that are maintained by a single person who likes working with plain text. It scratched my itch, anyway, and I release it in case anyone else has the same itch. Code, documentation, and bug reports: http://github.com/jgm/yst/tree/master John