Static site builders

[aehlke]

Hi again

I've discovered Zola as an attractive static site builder alternative to Hugo, which can't really run in-browser. Zola however is Rust and someone ported it to WASM to build sites in-browser a year ago: https://dstaley.com/posts/running-zola-on-wasm/

Would be very cool to have this working in live-codes!

Another interesting one is Wordpress WASM: https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-playground which has recently done work to enable simple ways of generating a static site

[hatemhosny]

Hi @aehlke
Nice to have more suggestions and ideas from you :)

How would you see these integrated in LiveCodes?
How would that be different from the export functionality that is already available?

[aehlke]

(My use case is to wrap deployable static site generators in native iOS and later Android apps, such that simple native editing UI can preview the results on-device and offline, and realtime sync to a prod environment, in addition to being deployed to CI as-is and not only running on device)

[hatemhosny]

I'm still not sure how this fits in LiveCodes.
Static site generators converts inputs files (markdown, templates, etc) to multiple static files (e.g. html, css)
LiveCodes already converts markdown and multiple template formats to html. This can be exported.
However, there is no concept of file system (with multiple files) in LiveCodes.
I do not think Zola fits as one of the supported language compilers, or can fit as a supported feature (like import, export, embed, etc)

[aehlke]

@hatemhosny after thinking it over I don't have a good use case for you, thanks for considering it. I started from the point of view that your tool is a great unified interface sandbox for executing wasm developer tools where there are content/style/logic components and hadn't fully connected the dots to how these static site wasm tools could fit in alongside ones like Svelte and Astro, given they both have input and rendered output. If Zola in particular had a good use case for you, then it'd be great to have it working inside a reliable sandbox, but I agree it doesn't make sense for your project

Maybe there are one-page use cases for WordPress or Zola where you have single file friendly inputs and outputs, and which can be used in parallel with other livecodes instances for rendering a handful of things or varieties of inputs to an instance opened to a particular script. That might fit your project but would require more research to develop the use cases. Zola lacks an online demo sandbox like LiveCodes, and is another wasm tool that can work on single file inputs and outputs.

[hatemhosny]

Thank you @aehlke
Please keep coming up with bright ideas and suggestions.
I always find them useful.
Thank you 💚

[aehlke]

I will keep it coming, thanks. I'm using this as a user extensible plugin system besides powering other dynamic code execution features on iOS/macOS and web/android soon, in all my products. It's great. And now Apple recently made a clear new rule that user script plugins are fine in all apps, so your tool can be embedded into social apps in the App Store. You might want to release a vanilla wrapper around your app in fact, or I could sometime