[Under development]
Scalite is a fully customizable blog-aware static site generator written in Scala 3. It takes input files in plain text, templates and stylesheets, and creates fully functional websites.
Most existing static-site generators force the user down an opinionated path to generating static websites, either by restricting the scope of customization or by restricting the format of input files. Scalite's vision is to abstract away all the low-level requirements for input files and achieve a robust generation process that is theoretically able to generate any kind of website. In one sense, Scalite may be considered a generator for static site generators, that is, one can emulate any other site generator with Scalite by modifying YAML configuration and implementing plugins.
As an example, one of the core features of modern site generators is templates. Most languages focus on a specific template and strongly integrate that templating language with the rest of the code to optimize the generation runtime. Scalite takes a different approach to this by providing an API for custom templating language implementations, at a cost of slightly higher runtime. All the other features, like, plain-text inputs, stylesheets, scripts, page structure etc. are also implemented abstractly to provide full flexibility.
Scalite doesn't assume whether you're making a blog for yourself or a homepage for a company, it's made to support any kind of static site.
By default Scalite provides three kind of user-written contents called Elements:
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| ItemLike | Anything that won't be rendered as a separate webpage, but will be used as part of other contents. |
| PageLike | Contents that will be rendered as a webpage, but unlike PostLike contents, doesn't have groups metadata. |
| PostLike | Blog-like posts with the functionality of groups. A post can belong to different groups. By default, two kinds of groups are defined: tags and categories. |
Besides, there's a plugin api that supports the definition of a custom Element.
Scalite doesn't force a templating language on you. By default Scalite provides support for Mustache templates, but plugins can be written to handle any other templating languages. Better yet, multiple templating languages can be used together in a single project.
Markdown is supported by default, but you can use any markup language to write your content, so long as you provide a plugin for it.
Scalite supports Sass stylesheets. If you fancy other contents that needs to be converted to something else, it's as simple as providing a converter, and adding a few lines in the YAML configuration!
You don't need to put your content in any of the default specified directories, add a line in the configuration, and the new directories will be used.
You don't need different bundles of content to be in different folders. Contents can have meta data in its front matter to set which groups they should be in. For example, to create a collection of pages related to programming, where pages might be collected by programming languages, you can put the posts into respective folders:
programming/
scala/
post1.md
post2.md
python/
post3.md
post4.md
Or, you could define a new SuperGroup named "programming" and add the following in
the front matter of any page post.md:
programming: scala, pythonAnd the post would be placed into a new hierarchy structure as given by the previous
example, no matter where the source file post.md resides.