[granra]

Yeah it would probably be more efficient to do the templating as a build step in the derivation that parses the markdown. But after making nixidy[1] I wanted to have a crack at making a static site generator _in nix_. I'm open to expanding it though of course :)

[1]: https://github.com/arnarg/nixidy

[mikepurvis]

Oh I can totally understand the impulse on that score. I guess going the way you have at the very least gets you out of some of the annoying handoffs of data between the two worlds, for example putting nix attrsets through toJSON so that they can be picked up on the Python side as template-fill variables.

The ROS 1 world was full of this kind of thing for getting values between Python and CMake and it's truly gross, eg: https://github.com/ros/catkin/blob/noetic-devel/cmake/templa...

[granra]

Out of curiousity, having never worked in the business of making websites, what would be accessible to a designer? Jinja2?

[mikepurvis]

I haven't for many years [1], but I think the current state of the art is stuff like webflow, silex, pinegrow. None of them _really_ let you directly open, say, django's template files and hack on them though, so there's still a gap where you've got a designer periodically exporting from a visual tool and then their changes having to be ported into the template representation. Obviously it's easy if all they touched was the CSS, but less obvious if markup is involved.

Honestly seems like there's a bit of a gap here. Would be an interesting case for copilot tbh— here, take the old export and the new export, and make me a PR applying those changes to the templates in this repo.

[1]: I was briefly an intern at a web shop in the late 00s and it was one guy doing Dreamweaver and the rest of us coding PHP around the assets it produced.