Winged Spider is a spectactularly easy to use, very fast static website builder. Winged Spider takes as input content organised nicely in a well named directory hierarchy, and generates as output web ready content with the same structure. The directory and file names from the input are used to create the website's menu structure, which means well named files and folders, and a coherent hierarchy automatically generates a very usable website.
So to make a website, write your pages in markdown, name them sensibly and organise them in hierarchical folders. Then run Winged Spider with a pre-supplied or custom template file and get a website that lets users navigate through all the content in an intuitive way, using menus that directly reflect the structure defined by the folder hierarchy.
The first pre-supplied template is based on "pure", a CSS framework from Yahoo. I had good results with it with manually generated pages, and am now having equally good results using Winged Spider to make my websites instead.
Pure is not being maintained, but it works well for simple projects and sometimes not being maintained is a feature not a bug (because the sands aren't shifting under you, you're using something that's finished and works).
Winged Spider V1.00 is now released. It has been used in production for an important, medium sized project (the New Zealand Chess Federation website) for several weeks even before V1.00.
In preparation for V1.00 I have created comprehensive user documentation and a full example (checked into the repo in the 'example' directory). In fact I fed two birds with one scone because the example is the documentation! I have put the rendered example here and it's also now available directly via Github pages.
Winged Spider was created for a chess website (New Zealand Chess Federation website, and has built in support for interactive chess presentation. For more details see the example project
Winged Spider has been tested on Windows, Linux and Mac. Simple project and solution files for Visual Studio C++ (2017) on Windows are provided. Windows and Mac executables are in the release .zip. I have tried to make it easy to build yourself on any platform. All that is needed is a C++17 capable compiler and linker. For simplicity's sake all the source files are in one directory (src), and even the third party MD4C c files have been renamed as cpp, with a few minor adjustments to make them correct C++ programs (mainly casting void pointers from malloc and realloc to typed pointers).
For example, the command line to build the Mac Intel executable was;
g++ -O3 -std=c++17 -o ws-mac-x64_86 -mmacosx-version-min=10.15 -arch x64_86 src/*.cpp
Note that this means the Mac version requires macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or later. This is a consequence of using the C++17 <filesystem> facilites to navigate the directory structure. Support for this has only been provided for recent macOS versions. There are much older well known Unix APIs for navigating directories, and if necessary, with a bit of work, it would be possible to retrofit them into Winged Spider.
Thanks to Martin Mitáš (mity on Github) for the MD4C markdown parser.
The name Winged Spider means nothing - it's just a cool name, and I bought wingedspider.com a few years back.
Bill Forster billforsternz@gmail.com