Webby - Part 2

Essential Features

2008-04-13

In my first post ( Webby - Part 1 ) I gave a basic description of Webby, a ultra-lightweight content management tool. In this post, I intend to cover the most essential features of Webby, starting with the creation of a new project and an overview of the rake tasks. From there I'll cover some of the helper methods that come with Webby.

What is Webby Doing?

Webby is useful because it allows the use of Ruby code as well as helpers, layouts, partials, filters (more on that later), and templates. From this Webby will create the file structure and html (or xml, atom, rss, etc.). This, seems to be done, in a very basic sense, by "running" the Ruby through one time and saving the files created. This is similar to what a page cache would do but, it is done manually due to the infrequency of an update.

Install Webby

First, in order to use Webby you have to install it. Thankfully, there is a gem, making this step very simple. Open the Terminal application (or what you would normally use to install a gem) and install Webby (with any dependencies). sudo gem install webby

Optional Installs

Personally, I like using Haml, so I installed that already. Webby is able to use a series of "filters" to make use of Haml, Sass, Textile, Markdown, and by default, erb. On top of the filters available to transform text, Webby has support for CodeRay and UltraViolet syntax highlighting.

Create a Project

Onto creating a project. Webby comes with a command, webby. We use this and the name of our project in one command and Webby will create the structure for the project, in the current location in the filesystem. To view the full list of options for the webby command, add the -h/--help flag (Hint: there aren't many). webby your_project_name_here

Rake Tasks

Many Ruby developers are experienced using Rake. Change to the project directory in Terminal and try this. rake -T The most frequently used tasks (for me, at least) are: rake create:whatever
rake autobuild
rake deploy:however The create task is provided a type of document to create (from a template). By default these include a page, a partial, or an atom feed. I will discuss adding to these templates in my next post. The autobuild tasks starts the included heel webserver and builds the files whenever it detects a "dirty" or changed file. This is very handy in development because you can instantly check your changes in a browser. Finally, the deploy task. Using either rsync or ssh, Webby will deploy the output files to your designated webserver.

Until next time you should read the official tutorial from Webby.

Next time I'll talk about extending these essential features, making Webby an extremely powerful tool.