webgen was a long time in the making. It all began about 10 years ago where I needed a tool for generating a static website.
Note: For a full list of release announcements, have a look at the news page!
First incarnation: XML and XSLT based
The first incarnation, not yet called webgen, was based on XSLT and created in late 2002. ‘Why?’ would be a valid question since XSLT is probably not the easiest language to write some complicated. However, at this time XML and XSLT appealed to me and I wanted to use them in a project.
There was on XML file that was used to hold the website template and many ‘page XML’ files that held the content, in one or more languages, and some meta information. XSLT was used to combine each page XML file with the template XML file to produce the output page.
It worked very well for some time but in the end, it proved to be too inflexible.
And Then There Was… Thaumaturge?
To overcome the inflexibility I decided to create a tool using Ruby in October 2003. This was the beginning of webgen but initially I wanted to have a “cool” name and decided that, since the things the program would do look like magic, the name “thaumaturge” would be appropriate.
This initial version did already incorporate most of the components that would evolve over the years:
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Plugin System: Initially called Universal Plugin System (UPS), it provided the ability to easily extend the functionality of the system.
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YAML configuration file: From the start the configuration file was based on YAML.
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Node Tree: The concept of reading source files and building an in-memory tree from them was in webgen from the start. It was built and written by the main file handler (what is now the main path handler) and could be changed by tree walkers.
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Node meta information: Since the XSLT based generator already had the notion of meta information this was incorporated in the Ruby based version as well.
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File handlers: These were responsible for reading the source files and writing the generated nodes to the output directory - sounds familiar? It should because they are just called path handlers now and still do the same.
Most of the file handlers that are available now were already available: one for handling directories, one for copying files, one for meta information backing files, one for templates and two for page files
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Page files: The XSLT based solution used XML files for content definition. So it only made sense to also use XML files for the first Ruby version. In addition, YAML files could be used for page files, too.
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Tag system: One of the main features of webgen is an easy to use system for adding dynamic content. This system, called webgen tags was already available with the same syntax in this version.
If you compare the above features with those of the current version, you can see the most features were already available nine years ago - this first version was released in July 2004. It was named webgen instead of thaumaturge because this described its functionality better.
The second version, webgen 0.2.0, was released shortly after the first and incorporated some more functionality but nothing major changed.
Webgen Page Format
Due to the first system being XML based the content files were also XML files. When switching to Ruby the format was not changed. Additionally, content files could also be written as YAML files which were only just a bit easier to write.
Therefore in January 2005 I decided to tackle this problem. I removed these two content file formats and introduced a new format where the meta information was a the top of the file, separated from the content by three dashes.
A content file looked like this:
---
title: Page title
menu: true
---
Here comes the content
Does this look familiar? If you have used one of the popular other Ruby static website generators it should because most use the above format.
This format evolved over the time and now allows multiple content blocks as well as defining block specific options on the block separator line.
The third version, webgen 0.3.0, was released shortly after introducing this new format in early 2005. Throughout this year there were incremental changes to webgen, like adding new plugins.
Major Changes and Version 1.0.0
All the following major versions (0.4.0, 0.5.0 and then 1.0.0) had backward-breaking changes.
When I realized that the latest version of the 0.3.x series was limited due to the core of the implementation, I completely overhauled the code. Naturally, this led to extensions of version 0.3.x not being usable by version 0.4.0. However, since the basic operating modus of webgen did not change, updating a webgen website was not that hard.
Changing the core of webgen always also meant changing the way how plugins got loaded and handled.
This also had the advantage of simplifying the implementation, at least at first. If you want to see
a use of Kernel::callcc, have a look at the plugin code of webgen 0.4.0. It worked but it got
complicated very quickly.
The fourth version, webgen 0.4.0, was released in January 2007, with many smaller updates following throught the year.
After realizing that parital website generation would not work with the core implementation of 0.4.x, another overhaul was due. During this stage one complete re-implementation of the webgen core system never saw the light of the day because after working on it for some time it became clear that this was the wrong way forward.
Prior implementations of webgen always tried to make clever use of the advanced functionality of
Ruby (see Kernel::callcc above). Starting from 0.5.x I tried to avoid such advanced functionality
to make maintaining of the code easier.
The fifth version, webgen 0.5.0, was finally released in July 2008 and supported partial website generation. However, some features of the 0.4.x series, like image gallery support, never made it into this new version. Incremental updates were released until September 2010 at which point I started to work on a new core implementation, again.
webgen 0.4.x and 0.5.x were quite popular in their times, partly because there weren’t that many good static website generators around. However, many people realized that there were valid use cases for static websites and many, many static website generators were created.
Implementing the new system took some time and since I thought that this new system would be “the one”, webgen 1.0.0 was finally released in September 2013 after about ten years of development.