Comment by prashanth1k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prashanth1k | Hacker News Reader

The templating system looks crisp and great. Nift documentation goes far beyond simple docs - that's a lot of practical advice (thank you). The support for scripting is welcome - although I come from a different world and will take time wrapping my head around it.

Great work overall!

I am sure this is a great tool for builders - sites are quite easy to replicate and the way templates are setup clearly helps.

At the same time, I think in order to really take off for the general population (incl. me) -

- It will be great if markup (HTML, or otherwise) could be "cleanly" separated from content (image, text, markdown etc)

- .. and, not worrying about scripting and its many avatars

Thanks for the feedback! Nift can certainly be used without any scripting (whether it be pre/post build scripts, injecting output from external scripts or its own in-built scripting abilities with n++/f++).

I do worry that things like Lua/ExprTk etc. might scare people who just need a basic static website generator, as I think Nift should still be one of the easiest to use for basic html/css/js websites.

One thing I hope I've succeeded at is ensuring the barebones of a project is quite basic (check out what you get if you run `nsm init-html` in an empty directory if you try installing). If you want you can easily just use Nift's functionality for injecting/inputting content from files at build time then just use basic html/css/js/etc. for your website, while also aiming to be able to integrate with basically any other tool you could possibly want.

It is quite a bit of work to set up things from scratch, but as you identified it's hopefully quite easy to set up templates/boilerplate to be replicated for other projects. In that regard Nift attempts to be unopinionated.

I am not quite sure what you mean by separating markup from content either? The templating system is extremely flexible with how you can lay your files out, inject content from basically wherever etc..

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