Treeplate

Treeplate is a set of xslt scripts for generating static websites. Authors write xhtml content by hand and provide a description of the site hierarchy. Treeplate generates the site, automatically fitting the content into boilerplate xhtml for

headers, including stylesheet, icon, and relation links,
footers, including author and last changed date,
a hierarchical menu bar without scripting, like the one at left, and,
a sitemap file for search engines.

Treeplate also adds alternating class attributes to table rows—class="row0", class="row1"—so that they can be coloured by a stylesheet if desired. There is an import feature for inserting generated content, like, for example, this manual page, and a feature for adding footnotes.¹ The boilerplate generation makes it easy to experiment with specialized support for troublesome browser software without having to manually edit all pages. Similarly, site redesigns may only require changes to the stylesheet and automatically-generated elements.

If your (planned) website is predominantly static and you prefer to create it in a text editor but you want to avoid the tedium of copy-paste-modify for the common bits, then Treeplate could be for you!

This website was generated by Treeplate.

Download

Treeplate is released under a BSD license. It may be used and modified without restriction but no guarantees or support are offered. Nevertheless, patches, problem reports, and suggestions for improvement (in keeping with the minimalist philosophy) are welcomed.

The current version is available for download: Treeplate 1.2.2 (20090422). It is intended for unix systems and requires a Bourne shell and xsltproc. It should also work with other xslt processors and only requires xslt 1.0, xpath 1.0, and the exsl:document extension.

The source code is kept at git@github.com:tbrk/treeplate.git.

Operation

treeplate, inputs: sitetree.xml, sitemaps.xml, outputs: sitemap.xml, sitepages.html — Figure 1: Source and destination files²

Treeplate requires these files and directories:

src	Contains `sitetree.xml` and the content `sitepage` files.
dst	Must replicate the directory structure of `src`. Contains any non-generated files, such as css style sheets, images, and pdf documents.
xsltsrc	Contains the xslt scripts; `makepage.xsl` can be modified to change the boilerplate.
makesite.sh	This simple shell script transforms xml files in `src` into html files in `dst`.

The sitetree.xml file

The sitetree.xml file describes the hierarchical structure of a site. An edited extract from this website is:

<!DOCTYPE sitetree SYSTEM "sitetree.dtd">
<sitetree>
    <rooturl>http://www.tbrk.org</rooturl>
    <prefix>Timothy Bourke - </prefix>
    <style>basic.css</style>
    <icon>favicon.ico</style>

    <item homelink="yes" priority="1.0">
	<name>Home</name>
	<file>index</file>

	<item directory="papers">
	    <name>Papers</name>
	    <file>abstracts</file>
	</item>

	<item changefreq="yearly">
	    <name>Address</name>
	    <file>mail</file>
	</item>
    </item>

    <item directory="software">
	<name>Software</name>
	<file>index</name>

	<item>Treeplate</name>
	<file>treeplate</file>
    </item>
</sitetree>

Two hierarchies are described: that of items as presented to visitors, and that of the organisation on disk. The latter may be simpler than the former and is expressed by the item directory attributes. The full list of item attributes is:

`directory`	describes how the files are stored on disk.
`inmenu`	if `"no"` the item is excluded from the navigation menu.
`homelink`	`"yes"` marks the home page (for relation links).
`sitemap`	if `"no"` the item is excluded from `sitemap.xml`.
`changefreq`	inserted directly into `sitemap.xml`.

Each item may contain other items, and must contain two elements:

name Text used in titles and menus.

file Root name for the the source .xml and destination .html files. An optional extension attribute allows the destination file extension to be changed. An optional url attribute allows menu items to be directed elsewhere; a destination page is still generated. An optional rellinkprefix attribute is prefixed to relative site links from the generated page, which is occasionally useful for accounting for the url attribute's effects.

Several settings can be set by adding the elements below to an item, or to the sitetree itself, they are inherited by that branch of the hierarchy:

`prefix`	Text inserted into the page title.
`suffix`	Text inserted into the page title.
`author`	Author name, with `href` attribute.
`style`	Filename of a css stylesheet.
`script`	Optional script which may contain a `src` attribute containing the url of a script file.
`icon`	Filename of a page icon.
`link`	Additional relation links, for instance for `copyright` and `content`, specified in a `rel` attribute; the element must contain a url.
`keyword`	Multiple keywords can be specified, they are not inherited if the attribute `inherit` is `"no"`. Non-inherited keywords can also be specified in the page source files.

The root sitetree element must contain rooturl, which is required to generate sitemap.xml. All other generated links are relative.

The source files

The source file for this page resembles:

<!DOCTYPE sitepage SYSTEM "sitepage.dtd">
<sitepage>
    <title>Treeplate</title>
    <description>Xslt scripts for generating a static website.</description>
    <lastmod>$LastChangedDate: 2008-06-06 12:50:53 +1000 (Fri, 06 Jun 2008) $</lastmod>
    <keyword>xslt</keyword><keyword>xhtml</keyword>
    <content>
    <h1>Treeplate</h1>
    <p>Treeplate is a set of xslt scripts for generating static websites.
    ...
    </content>
</sitepage>

The list of all possible sitepage elements:

`title`	The page title. An inherited prefix or suffix can be ignored with, respectively, the attributes `prefix="no"` and `suffix="no"`.
`description`	The page description.
`lastmod`	The last modified date for insertion into the footer. The $ signs, from subversion tags, are removed if present.
`keyword`	Associated keyword. Multiple `keyword` elements may be given. They are combined with the inherited keywords.
`author`	Overrides the inherited `author` attribute. An `href` attribute must be given.
`prepage`	Optional text for insertion before the opening `html` element.
`header`	Optional additional elements for insertion into the destination `head`. An optional `charset` attribute allows a charset other than `UTF-8` to be specified.
`style`	Optional filename of a page-specific css stylesheet.
`script`	Optional page-specific script. It may contain a `src` attribute containing the url of a script file.
`navbar`	Optionally construct a navigation bar on each page using the given text as the first label. A `class` attribute is permitted.
`content`	Xhtml content for insertion into the generated page. The content is usually wrapped in a `div` with `id="main"`, but the `id` value can be overridden with a `mainid` attribute. The `footer="no"` attribute will disable the addition of a page footer. A `class` attribute is added to `tr` elements, as described above, if they do not already have one. The content may contain `import` tags with an `href` attribute, relative to the source file, to insert generated content. The content may contain `footnote` tags containing inline html elements. Footnotes are replaced with a link to the full text.
`postpage`	Optional text for insertion after the closing `html` element.

Sometimes links change when a website is rearranged. Redirection pages can be generated by giving title and redirect elements only. The latter must have a single href attribute containing the updated url.

Validation

Document Type Definitions are provided for the sitetree and sitepage files, they rely on the modular xhtml 1.0 definitions, but validation is disabled in makesite.sh by default. It can be enabled by removing the --novalid option from the call to xsltproc.

Like this one!
Figure 1 uses elements from Image:XSLT en.svg by Dreftymac. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.