Almoststatic

Welcome to Almoststatic’s documentation!

Almoststatic is a static sites and web pages generator engine written in Python which utilizes the Jinja2 template system to render pages. It can be integrated with Flask apps to serve static contents on dynamic sites or used standalone for static sites development.

Pages are declared in YAML files and rendered with Jinja2 template files. The HTML contents can be written in Markdown markup language or in plain HTML. The “content” folder contains all data needed to do the job, and the “config.yaml” is used to share global parameters and to set up configuration.

It is loosely inspired by Hugo static site generator, but it differs in many ways.

Why Almoststatic?

There are many static site generators such as Next.js, Hugo or Jekyll, but you might prefer Almostatic because:

  • It’s perfect for pythonist. It uses Jinja2 and Flask, widely used by the Python community, eliminating the need to learn other programming languages or template engines.

  • It’s easy to use The rules are minimal, requiring you to learn only a few things, offering great flexibility.

  • It’s versatile. The engine has a powerful recursive system for embedding and including content. This helps in building rich content and splitting it into small, maintainable pieces called “widgets” (see Writing pages).

  • It has blog capabilities. Contains functions to query metadata info useful for organizing blog pages by categories and tags.

  • You can deliver static and dynamic contents at same time. With Flask you can build your dynamic content and let Almoststatic to render the rest of page or the entire page, if it is full static.

  • Write static sites. Static sites composed only of text files and media contents are easy to deliver on the web, secure by design, require less maintenance and resources, and are faster. If you have no need for dynamic content, Almoststatic allows you to write all pages as static.

  • Not only for pythonists. Basic knowledge of python is needed, but once your developer environment is ready, Almoststatic lets you focus on writing YAML and Markdown content and creating your own widgets in HTML and Jinja2.

Project status

Almoststatic is young but stable! It has all the planned features and has consistently delivered the right results, making it “production-ready.”

At the moment there are only a few themes. we are developing a “rolling theme” with some beautiful widgets ready to use. See Flatstep theme and follow the tutorial.