nicolasvan

I could not agree more with you. Even if I created Pygreen I would not use it for big projects. But I know what I'm doing when I create my small web sites and I know for a simple static web site 'start with html and add dynamic bits' is just fine. See it as a bash script, it's not meant to be readable nor reusable. It's quickly created code that serves for one purpose.

I'm the first to say it's quick&dirty. Yet quick&dirty has its advantages in some cases, even for good programmers that know how to make solid and maintainable applications.

That's what I did too. And it's true there is no better way to get exactly what you need. Plus if you know your tools correctly you can be very productive with it.

I created PyGreen to be able to do the same thing but with an even faster startup. With it I don't need to create a base setup or copy-paste an old one. I just begin to work on the home page and exporting the style of the web site in a template takes like 10 seconds. And that's it, I spent 10 seconds on the coding of my website and I can use pygreen gen to get my static version to push on github pages.

Later, if I want, I can ditch the static version and add dynamic web pages. PyGreen does not use declarative markdown files, there is nothing that prevents you from adding completely dynamic stuff in the templates. It also uses Bottle, which is almost the same as Flask. So I can just add routes to Bottle and anything dynamic I could need then publish my app on a small server.

Yes, of course, who didn't :). That was the way to learn html in the nineties.

No, seriously, if you want to compare with an old stuff compare with PHP because that's precisely what I copied. But as far as I know there was no other project that ported that quick&dirty approach to Python.

Nikola is very similar to Jekyll or nanoc. Everything is declarative, you're limited to the features implementented in the generator (and to the features that are documented). That's really not the same thing than the quick&dirty, code-what-you-need approach of PyGreen.