WebMake

Aaron Swartz points to href="http://webmake.taint.org/">WebMake, which is a lovely little system
for generating static HTML pages from config files: a tiny CMS. It appears
(in the twenty minutes or so that I’ve been looking at it so far) to have
that wonderful aspect that so many Unix tools have, of hiding a large amount
of power and flexibility in a small radar signature. Like
Blosxom,
it externalises interface complexity in an intelligent way: its target audience
will already be familiar with most of the concepts and be able to deal.
(Its creator,
Justin Mason, is also responsible for
SpamAssassin and href="http://sitescooper.org/">Sitescooper, among other things.)

Aaron mentioned it in a blog entry entitled
Bake, Don’t Fry,
WebMake being one of a number of tools used to create rapidly-changing
content sites without dynamic (i.e. generated on request) pages. Most blogging
tools work this way. I remember writing a couple of systems like WebMake (though
much less powerful)
for sites like Starship Titanic,
where I wanted non-techies to be able to edit content in text files without them
worrying about templating. (Shim
later wrote a system called Genetic Floor, which was actually quite close
to what WebMake is, but was more web-interface oriented)
I’ve been wondering about this for my href="http://yoz.com/">personal site as well: I want consistent templating
around my site pages and my blog, but to be able to change the template. I just
realised that I can keep the master
template in WebMake config files, and have it output MovableType template files
(which can be linked to in the MT config). Sweet!