Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

the_mitsuhiko

Direct links to project:

* Website: https://www.getlektor.com/

* Github: https://github.com/lektor/lektor

Would be really curious to hear how people like it :)

View on HN

You need to make sure you have the following software installed on your computer:

- Python 2.7 (not Python 3.x)

I've read some of your remarks about Python 3, but it seemed like you were (at least begrudgingly) accepting the shift to Python 3. So why no forwards compatibility here? Any plans to support Python 3 in the future?

I build this originally for myself and i don't use python 3. I'm happy to accept patches for python 3. I think it should not be hard.

"I build this originally for myself and i don't use python 3"

Great to see another useful bit of software created. Did you miss the opportunity to build it in Python3?

It's quite late for me so I've only had time to read the documentation, but so far I love what I see. I've had a goal of building the static site tool I've wanted to use for a long time now, name chosen and everything, but you may have built something nice enough I don't need to.

If this is as nice yo use as the documentation leads me to believe it will be, I may just turn some of my existing exploratory code into plugins for this instead of building my own entire tool around them.

Very nice. I had been building the same thing after wanting something more than pelican and less than wordpress. This seems to fit perfectly.

Is there a roadmap for contributing to the project? I failed to see one on github.

> Is there a roadmap for contributing to the project? I failed to see one on github.

Nope. Hoping to get some feedback to see what people need. It does what I need pretty much at the moment. Just figured i add some docs and share it as some sort of Christmas or whatever else you celebrate present.

Would you mind listing some specific features you're interested in? I ask because I've recently switched from WordPress to Pelican, and I'm quite happy, so far at least.

Looks nice, Armin

A question (that will surely become a FAQ) - how does this compare with Pelican? Is this a non-programmer-friendlier alternative to Pelican?

It is. But it also is a lot more flexible. It's more of a framework than a simple generator.

Interesting. Being a framework and more flexible sounds like something that's more programmer oriented rather than more "common people" oriented. I'll check out how you managed to pull this off once I get some free time

the ini-file configuration seems a bit strange to me(esp since it seems to be ini-files that occasionally contain python code). Why did you go with them instead of making these python classes? To allow the GUI to edit parts of them as well?

> the ini-file configuration seems a bit strange to me(esp since it seems to be ini-files that occasionally contain python code). Why did you go with them instead of making these python classes? To allow the GUI to edit parts of them as well?

I grew to heavily dislike the idea of just executing random code to configure things. Impossible to expose to tools, even harder to reason about it. Note that these files do not contain python code at all. They just sometimes contain little Jinja templates.

The idea is indeed that the GUI can eventually edit some of these things. It also is already used for `lektor plugins add` for instance which updates the project ini file.

Lastly the reason ini over yaml is purely that this can preserve comments and doing the same for yaml is a lot more work i did not have time for :)

Thanks. Yes, the code-as-configuration thing is difficult, it invites people to do very strange things sometimes.

    [children]
    replaced_with = site.query('/projects').filter(F.categories.contains(this))

(from the categories example) looked a lot like embedded code to me ;)

Since there is no SQL I'm using the expression language from the templates for queries :)

>Lastly the reason ini over yaml is purely that this can preserve comments and doing the same for yaml is a lot more work i did not have time for :)

Was that the only thing that bothered you about YAML/pyyaml or were there other things you'd like to see fixed?

YAML is really quite complex. I like it in general but it's impossible to dump the data out without destroying the structure of the file (throw away comments, change whitespace, formatting style etc.)

Did you look at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ruamel.yaml ?

Nope. Did not see it. That's neat though. Would probably have done it differently in that case, but no real reason to switch now.

TOML? It was made because YAML was too complex.

I always love your work, Armin. Definitely sounds like something I've been looking for for ages. Definitely will give it a try.

This looks nice! Thanks for sharing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com