Simple Stupid Static Site Generator (S4G) in Python

Yes, this is yet another static site generator.
I use raw python template and markdown syntax with little tweaking.
It has been inspired by this post on Hacker News.

Look at gen.py for details.
I try to keep it simple stupid.

Principles are:

Python based templating
Content is written using CommonMark
Links to internal .md files are converted to .html
Home link management to the root location
Subtitle management for sub-pages
- default is filename with dashes (-) replaced by spaces
- can be overload by the page_title metadata
Template configuration through Front Matter metadata
Automatic copy of non-markdown files when parsing the directory structures (.png, .jpg, .php, .zip, .css, .txt, .htaccess, ...)
Automatic copy of dedicated files that are out of the source directory structure
Front Matter metadata supports:
- Custom html templating (to override _templates/default.html)
- Explicit activation of publication (nothing published by default)
- PHP file generation with raw php extension (see below)
- Python addons for dedicated and specialized outputs
Simple blog extension through meta-data and php

Configuration

Front Matter metadata

Activation of publication

Only .md files with activated publication are generated in the target directory hierarchy.

---
published: yes
---

Custom templage

With the following metadata gen.py will use _template\my_template.html instead of _template\default.html

---
template: my_template
---

PHP generation

As an alternative to the default .html file generation, it is possible to generate a .php file.

---
extension: php
---

Having a php extension allows to include raw php code through oneliner comments. For example:

<!-- php_code: include 'citation.php'; -->

will put

<?php include 'citation.php' ?>

in the php output file.

This is how the dynamic citation of the main index page is done and the citation.php file contains something like:

<div id="citation">
<?php
    $json_str = file_get_contents('citations.json');
    $arr = json_decode($json_str);
    $entry_id = random_int(0, count($arr)-1);
    echo $arr[$entry_id];
?>
</div>

Python add-ons

It is possible to load one addon per markdown file. The following meta-data loads module_name.py from the markdown file directory.

---
addon: module_name
---

Once loaded, it is possible to call functions from this module to generate additional outputs. Currently, it only support generation of markdown outputs through oneliner comments such as:

<!-- markdown_addon: function_name() -->

With markdown_addon it calls function_name within the markdown data before the HTML production.

Python dependencies

For converting markdown .md files to .html I use markdown it py with core plugins (mdit-py-plugins).

Install it using the pip install markdown-it-py[plugins] command.