Static HTML Website

murks

Hey there, first of all: thanks for your amazing work!
I just installed Automad and started taking a deeper look at it and it seems to be exactly what I was looking for in a neat way.

So basically, I was planning to build a website in a similar way than this one: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website/ focussing as simple as possible structures, smallest files, no fancy stuff. But since I won't be the only one editing or adding content, I started to look for a 'minimalist' CMS and it seems I found one.

This would then finally be my question and/or feature request:
Is there a way to generate pages as static HTML files only? I would basically want to edit or add something in the CMS and then get everything necessary updated and pushed as a new static HTML file. New versions should only be created if content was changed in the backend.
I am not exactly sure how your caching engine works but it seems doing something similar. The only "problem" is, it sees objects as "cached" as far as I understood?

Hoping this post was understandable and thanks again for your great work!
Murks

mad

Yes, that‘s basically how the caching works - described in a simplified way. Only when content is unchanged, a static HTML page is served.

That process is still dynamic, since filtering and searching should be still possible. Therefore it is not possible to just serve HTML files directly without checking for changes or search requests first.

murks

Thanks again for your fast reply. Would there be a way to achieve the result I was looking for without rewriting the whole caching procedures? I don't need searching or filtering in my served front end.

mad

You are welcome!

It is difficult to separate those things. Even if searching or filtering are not always required, those features are essential parts of the core and can be seen as a basic feature of any CMS.

In terms of performance you don’t have to worry. The way the cached HTML is served by PHP is almost as fast as a static site.

Or is there a special reason why you need a static site? In that case, any CMS would be a bad choice and maybe s static site generator would be the better tool.

murks

The idea was to make the website as energy-saving as possible. It is going to run a raspberry pie powered by a solar panel and should be as "low-tech" as possible. So no JS or alike and preferably no PHP in the frontend.

I will look into static site generators or worst case create something on my own. Thanks though ?

Sam

On a previous Automad version I was able to generate a site on my local environment to get the HTML pages which could then be uploaded to hosting.

Is this still possible on the current version?

mad

You can still use the cached HTML files. But those files have to be renamed first. And at some point you will also have to fix some broken links.

Sam

Hi Mad,

I'm running a site locally at the moment and I visit the cache/pages/localhost/automad/ folder, I can only see one file titled 'cached.html'.

Wondering how the caching system works, is this where all my cached files should be stored, and is there any reason I'm only seeing one page here currently?

Also as mentioned above, turning this into some type of static-site-gen would be an awesome feature!

Edit: Figured it out, signed out and visited the page as a regular user and I can now see the page in the cache. I can see what you mean about renaming some files etc. Looks like it would require a way to re-write the URL paths of these files/folders and references to stylesheets/images/JS.

mad

Sam I could imagine that the file renaming and url rewriting is part of your deployment process. Maybe a little shell script which combines that process with moving the files.