Statgen

Statgen is a Jekyll-inspired static blog-aware site generator, using NodeJS, Markdown and Handlebars. It offers a simple CLI, making site generation effortless.

Installation

Install Statgen with NPM. Run the following command to install statgen globally at a terminal prompt.

$ npm install statgen -g

Usage

Create a new statgen site in the current folder by using:

$ statgen new

This will create default source files and folders, along with a configuration file. Once this is in place, you can then run a build task like below.

$ statgen build

At this point, the site has been coverted into html files and your site is ready for deployment.

Pages and Posts

You can create new posts and pages using either of the following commands:

# Generate a page markdown file
$ statgen page -t "About" -s "about"
$ statgen page --title "About" --slug "about"

# Generate a post markdown file
$ statgen post -t "First post"
$ statgen post --title "First post"

Once you have run a new page or post task, a .md file will be created in the relavent directory. You can edit the file by adding markdown content. Run the build task to re-generate the site.

Directory Structure

├── _includes
|   ├── footer.hbs
|   ├── header.hbs
|   ├── nav.hbs
|   └── recent.hbs
├── _layouts
|   ├── archive.html
|   ├── index.html
|   ├── page.html
|   ├── post.html
|   └── tag.html
├── _pages
|   └── about.md
├── _posts
|   └── 20-03-17-first-post.md
├── _site
├── _statgen.json
└── .statgen-build

An overview of what each of these does:

| File/Directory | Description | |---|---| | _includes | These are the partials that can be mixed and matched by your layouts to facilitate reuse. | | _layouts | These are the templates that wrap posts and pages. Here you can add layouts and assign them to the markdown files on an individual basis. | | _pages | This is where Statgen saves generates pages as markdown files. | | _posts | This is where Statgen saves generates posts as markdown files. | | _site | This is where the generated site will be placed (by default) once Statgen is done buildiing the site. It's probably a good idea to add this to your .gitignore file | | _statgen.json | Stores configuration data. | | .statgen-build | This helps Statgen keep track of which files have not been modified since the site was last build. It's probably a good idea to add this to your .gitignore file. |

Configuration

Configuration options are specified in a _statgen.json file placed in your site’s root directory. Please DO NOT delete any of the default JSON object properties in this file. You can, however, update the values of the properties to suit the needs of your project.

Any added properties add to the JSON object will be available via siteData in templates. See below:

_statgen.json

...

"paths": {
        "pages": "_pages",
        "posts": "_posts",
        "layouts": "_layouts",
        "includes": "_includes",
        "site": "_site"
    },
    "googleTrackingCode": "UA-XXXXX-X"
}

_includes/footer.hbs

...
    <script>
        window.ga = window.ga || function () { (ga.q = ga.q || []).push(arguments) }; ga.l = +new Date;
        ga('create', '{{ siteData.googleTrackingCode }}', 'auto');
        ga('send', 'pageview');
    </script>
    <script async src='https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js'></script>
...

Backlog

Below is a list of features that will be potentially added to Statgen in the near future.

• Default example CSS file to give default styling
• Assets folder copied into the build site folder during build task
• SASS pre-processing during build task
• Data files in _data to be accessed via siteData in templates