[wix-devs] WiX Web Site

Rob Mensching rob at firegiant.com
Tue Feb 16 22:30:04 PST 2016


With static site generation, I’ve found shaping your data can go a long way to making your content and layouts easier to write. Something to keep in mind. In this case, I think you’re probably right and restructuring the data is unnecessary.

If you’d like to contribute to tinySite you’re welcome to help improve the README.md over there.

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FireGiant  |  Dedicated support for the WiX toolset  |  http://www.firegiant.com/

From: Brian Drennan [mailto:brian.e.drennan at outlook.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2016 10:03 PM
To: Rob Mensching <rob at firegiant.com>; WiX Toolset Developer Mailing List <wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org>
Subject: RE: [wix-devs] WiX Web Site

Hi Rob,

Thank you for the insights! I agree, release/ is preferable to releases/releases.html (makes perfect sense when explained that way).

For the current item… It was agreed the output should simply be swapping the position of the weekly releases with the production releases, correct? The structure of how the data is obtained shouldn’t change, though?

I might be interested in developing some documentation for tinySite if you think it’s worth doing, but I go to school in
the spring in fall in addition to work, so the schedule is pretty packed as-is.

Thanks again!

From: Rob Mensching<mailto:rob at firegiant.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2016 4:22 PM
To: WiX Toolset Developer Mailing List<mailto:wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org>
Subject: Re: [wix-devs] WiX Web Site

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<mailto: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
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