heckweasel/docs/index.html

<h1>HECKWEASEL documentation!</h1>

<p>Welcome to the index for HECKWEASEL Documentation. In this directory you&rsquo;ll find a bunch of files but this is the introduction you need to understanding the way heckweasel works and how to use it.</p>

<h2>Introduction Part 2: What the hyeck is Heckweasel?!</h2>

<p>Heckweasel is a website compiler framework. Primarily it allows the creation of web site using a collection of flat files which are in a maintainable form, producing the less maintainable formats that web browsers use.</p>

<p>The flat files in a heckweasel project are just a directory of files like any other. There is a default directory structure for projects but that isn&rsquo;t important right now.</p>

<p>Heckweasel projects generally take the form of a collection of one or more templates and a collection of one or more files that are filled into the templates. Pervasively, heckweasel draws a distinction between the contents of a web page and the template it gets put into. You can think of the template, as generally used by heckweasel, as a sort of picture frame into which your content is placed. The content itself may be implemented as one of several popular formats such as Markdown and HTML. Also of note is that there are sort of two routes from heckweeasel input to heckweasel output, one route is through the template system and the other route merely copies the input to the output.</p>

<p>Another important detail about heckweasel is metadata. Every item in the heckweasel project (thus, every file in the heckweasel project directory) has a collection of <em>metadata</em> associated with it, such as its file name, creation time, and other objective information, but also any arbitrary information about it such as its title, a short description, thumbnails or whatever. It&rsquo;s also important to note that the <strong>content</strong> of a file counts as metadata, and is stored the same way inside of heckweasel&rsquo;s way of looking at the files. Metadata is stored with the file as <em>filename</em>.meta and directories contain metadata in the file called .meta. Metadata is also inherited! So setting a template in a directory&rsquo;s metadata will apply to all of the contents of that directory. Metadata is all in a JSON format called JStyleSon, which is JSON except you can have comments in it. All of these metadata are accessable from the templates, which leads to&hellip;</p>

<p>The final important detail about heckweasel is that it, at is core, uses a programmable template system called Jinja. Jinja allows a lot, and I mean a <em>lot</em> of flexability in the way that the output is produced, giving complete programmability. This allows templates (and pages, for that matter) to contain programmable outcomes such as showing a list of all blog entries (each of which would be a separate file), or making a thumbnail gallery from a collection of pictures, or generating an RSS feed from all of the contents of the site. This also allows the website design to be broken into parts such that commonly-used patterns can be merely included in the file rather than being written repeatedly (although normally this function done with the page templates).</p>

<h2>Just the very Basic Heckweasel Project</h2>

<p>So with all of that said, the most basic possible heckweasel project that is actually functional would be something like a page template, and a content file called index. Heckweasel operates on an input directory and outputs to an output directory. This is admittedly not a normal use case since it doesn&rsquo;t benifit much from the elaborate system underneath, but it gets the idea across.</p>

<p>So you have your project directory <code>mywebsite</code>; inside we can have the directories <code>source</code> and <code>publish</code>, and various files, and well here&rsquo;s a picture:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>mywebsite</strong>

<ul>
<li><strong>source</strong>

<ul>
<li><em>.meta</em></li>
<li><strong>templates</strong>

<ul>
<li><em>default.jinja</em></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><em>index.md</em></li>
<li><em>index.md.meta</em></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><strong>publish</strong></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>


<p>To explain the various files:</p>

<h3><em>.meta</em></h3>

<p>This file is a JSON file containing project-wide metadata. Usually this would be metadata that applies, by default, to all files. Some things that affect the way Heckweasel processes files would be <code>template</code> which would set the default template to put content into and <code>templates</code> which would set the directory to look for templates in. By custom we also may want to set the title, author and other things like that which we may want to fill into the output files. We also put things like the eventual published address for the site (<code>site_root</code>).</p>

<p>Example .meta file:</p>

<p>```json</p>

<p>{
    &ldquo;site_root&rdquo;: &ldquo;https://website.me&rdquo;,
    &ldquo;author&rdquo;: &ldquo;Very Nice Person&rdquo;,
    &ldquo;title&rdquo;: &ldquo;My Website&rdquo;
}</p>

<p>```</p>

<h3><em>default.jinja</em></h3>