Ruby webgen 0.3.7 review

webgen is a Web site generator implemented in Ruby

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 1273K Developer: T. Leitner

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webgen is a Web site generator implemented in Ruby. Ruby webgen is used to generate static Web sites from templates and page description files. Ruby webgen is easy to use and extensible through plugins.

Here are some key features of "Ruby webgen":
webgen core

Easily extendable through plugins
Easy to install and use
Uses templates for separating layout from content
Easy to configure if one needs to (no need if you are happy with the default values)
Command line interface uses command style syntax (like Subversion's svn command)
Fast

File Handler (for handling the files in the source directory)

Powerful file copy handler for copying single files or entire directories to the output directory
Support for gallery definition files generates entire image galleries, with automatic thumbnail creation

Page Description Files (for define web pages)

Support for ERB (embedded Ruby) in page description files and in templates
Supports several different content formats (Textile, Markdown, RDOC, plain HTML), new ones are easy to add
Support for specifying meta information (e.g. title, menu ordering information, ...)

Tags (used for easily adding dynamic content to web pages)

Standard distribution provides often used tags
Menu tag can generate different types of menus (simple menus and ones with CSS drop downs)
Breadcrumb trail tag generates a breadcrumb trail so that one always knows where he is in the hierarchy
Relocatable tag for automatically generating correct relative paths to files
... and much more!

Other Features

Automatically checks generated files if they are standard conform
Supports 'virtual files' via meta information backing files
Support for automatic smiley replacement with emoticons

What's New in This Release:
Now using cmdparse version 2.0.0!
Attention: For unified naming in reference to image galleries, I have removed all occurences of the word "picture" from the code and documentation and replaced it with "image". Therefore you may need to adapt your code, especially custom gallery layouters!
Attention: Many documentation and library files have been renamed for better consistency! Custom plugins may have to be adapted!
New application for managing image galleries (only alpha quality currently!)
Smileys are now optionally replaced with emoticons (smiley :-) smiley ;-) smiley :'-( smiley 8-), several different emoticon packs available) see SmileyReplacer
Site specific commands (used in command line processing) can now be used
New plugin Download Tag for nice download links
New parameters: PageFileHandler:defaultPageMetaData, SitemapTag:honorInMenu
Removed parameters: PageFileHandler:useERB, PageFileHandler:defaultContentFormat
Renamed tag navbar to breadcrumbTrail
Images in image galleries can now be ordered by specifying the orderInfo meta information
The use of directory index files is now optional: by setting the parameter DirectoryHandler:indexFile to nil directory index files are not used
Languages can now be specified using 2-char ISO-639-1 codes or 3-char ISO-639-2 codes
Now there is a link (next to the wiki link) to the source of each page unless the page was programmatically generated.