Welcome to Almoststatic’s documentation!¶
Almoststatic is a static sites and web pages generator engine written in Python which uses the Jinja2 template system .It can be integrated with Flask apps to serve static contents on dynamic sites or can be used stand alone for static sites development.
Pages are declared in yaml files and rendered with Jinja2 template files, the html contents can be written in markdown markup language or in plain html. “content” folder contains all data needed to do the job, the “config.yaml” is used to share global parameters and to setup configuration.
It is roughly inspired by Hugo static site generator, but it differs in many ways.
Why¶
There are many static site generators such as Next.js, Hugo or Jekyll, but you can prefer Almostatic because:
It’s perfect for pythonist. It uses Jinja2 and Flask which are widely used by python community, so you don’t need to learn other programming languages or template engines.
It’s easy! In fact the rules are very few and this mean few things to learn and great flexibility.
It’s versatile. It’s engine has a powerful recursive system for embedding and including contents. This helps you to build rich contents and also to split them in small pieces called “widgets” easier to maintain, (see Writing pages).
It has blog capabilities. Contain functions used to query metadata info useful to organize blog pages by categories and tags.
You can deliver static and dynamic contents at same time. With Flask you can build your dynamic content and let Almoststatic to render the rest of page or the whole page, if it is full static.
Write static sites. Static sites are composed only by text files and media contents. They are easy to deliver on the web, are secure by design, require less maintenance and resources and are faster. If you have no need for dynamic contents, with Almoststatic you can write all pages as static.
Not only for pythonists. Basic knowledge of python is needed, but once your developer environment is ready, Almoststatic lets you to focus on writing yaml and markdown’s contents and to create your own widgets in html and Jinja2.
Status of project¶
Almoststatic is young but stable! It has all planned features and always gave me the right results so it can be considered “production ready”
At the moment there are only a few themes, we are developing a “rolling theme” with some beautiful widgets ready to use. See Flatstep theme and follow the tutorial.