[wix-devs] WiX Web Site

[Rob Mensching]

Also, part of the challenge here is understanding how tinySite (http://github.com/robmen/tinysite) works. Bob mentioned the stuff between --- is "frontmatter". It's metadata about the document.  The body of the document (everything after the second ---) is rendered based on the document extension as the document's "content". So, in this case, releases.html.cshtml body is rendered by Razor.

So, where is the bulk of the "web stuff"?  That's in the "layout". In this case the layout is "herosmall" so you look in the "layouts" folder for a file named "herosmall.*".  That layout is rendered with the data from releases.html.cshtml. Note that layouts can have layouts so the output of "herosmall" maybe be rendered again by the next layout (in this case, IIRC, "master").

The result is written to a "releases/index.html" file. We do that since "index.html" is the default document for a folder so you can navigate to just "wixtoolset.org/releases/" instead of "wixtoolset.org/releases.html".  I like the first better than the latter. Technically, tinySite can be configured to render either.

Anyway, this is all the very cool world of static site generation. Tiny site has lots of cool features to render static sites. We use it for https://www.firegiant.com/ (including https://www.firegiant.com/blog/ and https://www.firegiant.com/wix/tutorial/). I also use it for all of http://robmensching.com/.

Feel free to ask questions, since documentation for tinySite itself is lagging.
_______________________________________________________________
 FireGiant  |  Dedicated support for the WiX toolset  |  http://www.firegiant.com/


-----Original Message-----
From: wix-devs [mailto:wix-devs-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org] On Behalf Of Brian Drennan
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2016 8:11 PM
To: wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org
Subject: [wix-devs] WiX Web Site

Hey all,


Just a quick question about the site, because the few times I’ve looked at it I’ve been perplexed about something:

The site has this (raw) content in the releases.html.cshtml document:

---
layout: herosmall
title: Releases
subtitle: weekly
image: /content/red_smoke_4.jpg
releases?: query documents where sourceRelativeFolder eq "documents\releases" descending date take 5
sidebarTitle: Published releases
sidebarItems: [
  { uri: "/releases/v3.10/stable",
    text: "WiX v3.10.1 (Stable)" },
  { uri: "/releases/v3.9/stable",
    text: "WiX v3.9 R2 (Stable)" },
  { uri: "/releases/v3.8/stable",
    text: "WiX v3.8 (Stable)" },
  { uri: "/releases/v3.7/stable",
    text: "WiX v3.7 (Stable)" },
  { uri: "/releases/v3.6/stable",
    text: "WiX v3.6 (Stable)" },
  { uri: "/releases/v3.5/stable",
    text: "WiX v3.5 (Stable)" },
  { uri: "/releases/v3.0/stable",
    text: "WiX v3.0 (Stable)" },
  { uri: "/releases/v2.0/stable",
    text: "WiX v2.0 (Stable)" }
  ]
---

Is this just markdown? It’s for some reason not being rendered when I run tinysite.exe (I re-pulled the source). Am I missing something? My apologies, I’m new to web development.

Also, that releases?: line – looks to me like a LINQ query, but I’ve never seen this in a web project previously (in my oh so extensive experience with web projects – I do mean that with the utmost sarcasm).

Sorry if the question is a bit of a newbie one, but we’re officially stretching the bounds of any prior experience I can draw from (which is part of why I wanted to get involved in the first place).

Thanks for the help! Hope everyone is having a good new year so far and enjoys the weekend!

Best Regards,

Brian Drennan