Basildon is a simple static website generator written in PHP and supporting Markdown content, Twig templates, SQLite, and outputs of HTML and PDF (via LaTeX).
This documentation is also available as a PDF.
Quick start
Prerequisites: PHP (version 7.4 or higher) and Composer.
composer create-project samwilson/basildon-skeleton mysitecd mysite./vendor/bin/basildon build .- Edit files in the
content/andtemplates/directories (for more details, see below).
Content
Content goes in the content/ directory, in whatever structure is required.
Each file comprises two parts:
- a frontmatter block of Yaml-formatted metadata; and
- and a text body after the frontmatter, in any format
(the file's extension should match this, e.g. the default
.mdfor Markdown).
Templates
Templates are written in the Twig language, and can output to any format required. Usually HTML is the target format, but LaTeX, XML, or anything else is just as possible. Formats do have to have a file extension though (that's how they're identified, in Basildon).
All templates live in the templates/ directory of a site.
The structure within that directory can be anything.
Assets (stylesheets, scripts, etc.)
All files (CSS, JS, images, etc.) in the assets/ directory,
and all non-page files in the content/ directory,
will be copied to output/.
"Non-page" means anything without a .md file extension
(or whatever your default is as defined by the ext key in basildon.yaml).
Images (and other files) can be in either the assets/ or content/ directories,
depending on how they're used in the site.
There is no real difference as far as how they end up in the output/ directory.
This means that you must be careful to avoid name collisions.
Output
All output is in the output/ directory of a site.
This directory is ready to be uploaded to a web server as the top level of the site.
The output/ directory is emptied on every run of Basildon.