A very, very, very simple static site generator gem.

• Tilt - for the templates.
• One of the gems Tilt uses for templating, depending on your needs.

Assuming you're using Bundler, add this to your Gemfile:

gem "dimples"

And then run bundle.

Dimples includes a very simple command-line tool, imaginatively named dimples, which lets you generate a site in the current directory by running dimples build.

It assumes your directory structure will possibly look something like this:

• config.json (required: your config file)
• lib/ (optional code to extend Dimples)
• pages/ (a bunch of awesome pages)
• posts/ (a bunch of clever, articulate posts)
• templates/ (a bunch of horribly attractive templates)
  • feeds/ (optional templates for feeds)

All pages, posts and templates support front matter.

Any files in pages/ will be turned into static pages, maintaining any folder hierarchy you're using. I know, amazing.

Dimples, being very opinionated, assumes your posts will be named in the following format:

{year}-{month}-{day}-{slug}.{extension}

Templates are the skeletons propping up the meat of all your pages and posts. Hm, that's kind of gross, but you get the idea. As they're rendered, templates are passed in three Ruby objects:

• @site, which refers to the entire Dimples::Site instance.
• @this, which refers to the current thing being rendered (a page, a post, or even a template itself).
• @type, which is the name of the thing being rendered (like post or page).

For example, a very basic template for a post might look something like:

---
<article class="post">
    <header>
        <h1><%= @this.title %> (I'm a <%= @type %>!)</h1>
    </header>
    <%= yield %>
</article>

Any templates stored in a feeds subdirectory will be used as a feed format, mapping its filename to the generated feed's extension - templates/feeds/atom.erb becomes feed.atom, and so on.

Any code in here will be loaded by the dimples command-line tool, and is primarily used to override the default classes in Dimples, in case you need to change things up for your own needs.

Dimples, like every other site generator out there, supports front matter at the beginning of a post, page or template file. It looks a little something like this (it's YAML):

---
title: My first post!
layout: post
categories:
- awesome
- the_best
---

I did it, mum.

With the above example, you'd have access to @this.title, @this.layout and @this.categories in your file.

Posts are also given @this.date and @this.slug, which matches what you used for their filenames.

You can override the file extension your page or post will end up with by supplying an extension element:

---
extension: txt
---

You tell Dimples what template to use by setting the layout element, which will map to the filename of any file in templates/, sans-extension (so templates/post.erb is available as post, and so on). This works for posts, pages and templates. Dimples makes no assumptions here, so unless you specify a layout, it won't use one.

---
layout: feed
---

A template represents the actual file on disk, whereas a layout signals which one to use. Make sense? Yeah, I didn't think so.

As a fussy and opinionated gem, Dimples has a lot of feelings about how it should generate a site, but that doesn't mean you don't get to have a say in it. Here's what the default config looks like, in JSON:

  "source_path": "(current directory)",
  "destination_path": "(current directory plus 'site')",
  "verbose_logging": false,
  "class_overrides": {
    "site": "",
    "post": ""
  },
  "rendering": {},
  "category_names": {},
  "paths": {
    "archives": "archives",
    "posts": "archives/%Y/%m/%d",
    "categories": "archives/categories"
  },
  "layouts": {
    "posts": "posts",
    "post": "post",
    "category": "category",
    "year_archives": "year_archives",
    "month_archives": "month_archives",
    "day_archives": "day_archives"
  },
  "pagination": {
    "per_page": 10
  },
  "generation": {
    "categories": true,
    "year_archives": true,
    "month_archives": true,
    "day_archives": true,
    "feeds": true,
    "category_feeds": true
  },
  "date_formats": {
    "year": "%Y",
    "month": "%Y-%m",
    "day": "%Y-%m-%d"
  }
}

And here's what it all means:

I think you're great.

In case Dimples doesn't do exactly what you want, you can substitute subclasses of the default site or post classes and override whatever makes sense to you, you go-getter.

These options will be passed directly to the renderer Tilt picks for your posts, pages and templates, based on the file extension.

By default, Dimples will capitalise your categories as their titles so you can display 'em nicely, but you can override that with your own formatting:

category_names:
  bsd: 'BSD'
  mac: 'Macintosh'

Defines where your generated posts will land.

The default layouts for various posts and pages.

There's only one option here, but it's pretty great.

A bunch of flags to toggle what's generated when running dimples build.

These are currently used to define the auto-generated title for each type of archive page, and are also passed to Ruby's strftime Time method.