JBake

by Jonathan Bullock

JBake is a Java based open source static site/blog generator for developers, bake your own web site!

Features

Supports both HTML & Markdown content
Allows you to structure your content any way you see fit
Blog aware (RSS feed, tags, archive)
Customisable templates
Scripting support in templates via Freemarker
Supports custom meta data that is exposed to templates
Features are configurable
Store your site in Dropbox, CVS, SVN, Git whatever you want

Getting Started

Get the source code
To start developing JBake run mvn eclipse:eclipse to build required Eclipse project files
To start using JBake run mvn package from the root folder to build a release distribution

Usage

Run jbake or jbake.bat (if you are on Windows) to do some baking, this will assume the current folder as the source and place any output into an output folder in the current folder
Alternatively run jbake <source_folder> <destination_folder> if you want full control over the source and destination folders

Source structure

Here is an example source folder structure:

.
|-- assets
|   |-- favicon.gif
|   |-- robots.txt
|   |-- css
|       |-- style.css
|-- content
|   |-- about.html
|   |-- 2013
|       |-- 02 
|           |-- weekly-links-1.html
|           |-- weekly-links-2.md
|-- templates
|   |-- index.ftl
|   |-- page.ftl
|   |-- post.ftl
|   |-- feed.ftl
|-- custom.properties

A full example source folder is provided with the source code.

Both http://jonathanbullock.com and http://jbake.org are built using JBake.

Assets

Place your static files in this folder and they will be copied to the root of the destination folder. Any folder structure you create will be maintained.

Content

Place your dynamic content in this folder, the content in the files in this folder will be "mixed" with the templates to generate your site. Again any folder structure you create will be maintained in the destination folder.

The extension of the file determines what content it contains:

.html = HTML content
.md = Markdown content

Header

Each content file needs to have a meta-data header in it:

title=Weekly Links #2
date=2013-02-01
type=post
tags=weekly links, java
status=published
~~~~~~

The header MUST have at least the status & type fields, the rest are optional.

Status

You have 2 options for the status field: draft and published, drafts are rendered along with published posts however they are given a "-draft" suffix, for example first-post-draft.html.

Type

You can choose what template your content file will be "mixed" with by changing the type field (i.e. type=post will use post.ftl, type=page will use page.ftl).

Extra Header

You can also add extra meta data in the header that is also exposed to the templates:

summary=This is a summary of the larger post

And access it from the template like so:

<p>${content.summary}</p>

Templates

This is the folder where your Freemarker templates go. For more information on what you can do in Freemarker templates see the Manual.

Here is the data that is available to you in your template files:

Global

This data is available to all templates regardless.

${version} = version of JBake
${config.[options]} = map of configuration data

All the configuration options in default.properties are available with any . in the property being replaced with _. For example template.index.file=index.ftl is available via ${config.template_index_file}.

${posts} = collection of all posts (files that don't have type=page)
${pages} = collection of all pages (files that have type=page)

You can loop through the above collections using:

<#list posts as post>
	..
</#list>

Within the loop you can then access the options for each post or page: ${post.[options]} or ${page.[options]}

All of the header fields are available such as ${post.title} and the body of the file is available via ${post.body}.

Page / Post

These templates (page.ftl & post.ftl) as well as any custom templates you create yourself have the following data available to them:

${content.[options]} = map of file contents

All of the header fields are available such as ${content.title} and the body of the file is available via ${content.body}.

Index / Feed / Archive

These templates (index.ftl, feed.ftl & archive.ftl) have the following extra data available to them:

${published_posts} = collection of published posts
${published_date} = date when file is generated (only available to Feed)

Configuration

The custom.properties file allows you to override the default configuration of JBake. You can change the name of the folder that stores your content or templates, decide whether to generate a an RSS feed or not. See default.properties for what options are available.

kaleeswaran14/JBake