Add Metalsmith (Static Site Generator) to Megaboilerplate about megaboilerplate

[sahat]

Sure, would love to see this. The way I did JS Library generator is first by building a fully-featured example, then break it apart into optional features like Travis CI, code coverage, license type.

I assume some of the options would follow that patterns, while other options would be orthogonal to each other, and those usually take a little longer to implement from my experience.

Let me know if you have any questions. But to give you a brief idea of how generators work:

1. All generators are categorized by type.
2. Each generator contains modules directory.
3. When you call await getModule() you give it a file path starting with the generator type, but excluding modules directory, e,g static-site/metalsmith/index.js.
4. To "create a new file", you use lodash's set function. Essentially you are creating a big JavaScript object, where object nesting translates into directory structure.
5. All files are created on params.build object.
6. You call replaceCodeMemory on files inside params.build that you have assigned in Step 4. Each file is a Node Buffer.

[bnb]

@sahat Hey! I'd like to try to work on this today. Got one question: would you be able to explain the .gitkeep file with the Jekyll and Middleman examples? Is that something native to the SSGs or to the Mega Boilerplate project?

[sahat]

Ah those are just hacks. There used to be images in there which I removed but wanted to keep folder around. The reason because images were getting corrupted when I create a zip archive. The issue has been resolved, so you can feel free to use any binary data in the generator.

[sahat]

@bnb How is the progress coming along with Metalsmith?

[bnb]

@sahat: Hey! So I've actually been re-evaluating Metalsmith recently for some other projects, and I've come to realize it's probably not good to continue using it, nor add it to a project such as megaboilerate.

There are 7 deps that are severely out of date in the Metalsmith project. The last commit was ~2 months ago, and the community and project hasn't been growing.

Adding it to Megaboilerate would add support for a stale project that would either be painfully maintained or ignored and neglected in the future.

Apologies for the trouble!

[sahat]

@bnb No worries, I agree with you. Thanks for the follow up.