Sheer will contain:
- Tools for loading arbitrary content into elasticsearch
- A WSGI server for mixing that content with Jinja2 templates
- scripts for pre-generating HTML from said configuration and elasticsearch data.
Jekyll is pretty darn compelling, for a number of reasons:
- Ease of management
- Ease of breaking out of the CMS (the "snowfall" problem)
- Serving static files is fast
- Bring your own version control
- On the whole, less mysterious than CMS's.
We want those advantages, but we dont' want to have to anticipate every way our editorial team might wish to slice and serve content. We don't want to have to anticipate what developers will want to do with our API, or which content third party publishers will want to syndicate on their site , or which collection of content people will want to subscribe to with RSS. We want to pre-generate (Jekyll-style) the common pages, without precluding the stuff we haven't thought of yet.
Our hypothesis is that we can combine some of Jekyll's ideas with a full-featured search engine, and get something powerful, flexible, productive, and fun.
Parts of it work!
sheer index -l directory will pull a sites content into Elasticsearch
sheer serve -l directory launches the web server
sheer --help
usage: sheer [-h] [--debug] [--location LOCATION]
[--elasticsearch ELASTICSEARCH] [--index INDEX]
{index,serve} ...
document loader and dev server for Sheer, a content publishing system
positional arguments:
{index,serve}
index load content into Elasticsearch
serve serve content from elasticsearch, using configuration
and templates at location
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--debug print debugging output to the console
--location LOCATION, -l LOCATION
Directory you want to operate on. You can also set the
SHEER_LOCATION environment variable.
--elasticsearch ELASTICSEARCH, -e ELASTICSEARCH
elasticsearch host:port pairs. Seperate hosts with
commas. Default is localhost:9200. You can also set
the SHEER_ELASTICSEARCH_HOSTS environment variable.
--index INDEX, -i INDEX
elasticsearch index name. Default is 'content'. You
can also set the SHEER_ELASTICSEARCH_INDEX environment
variable.