For information on Haml & Sass please see haml.hamptoncatlin.com.

CMS is overrated. A lot of the time, clients want us to do what we do best - well designed pages with structured, accessible and maintainable markup & styling.

CMSs are often perfect for this, but sometimes they can be restrictive and more cumbersome than just working with good ol' source code. At the same time we want our code to be structured, DRY and flexible.

Enter StaticMatic.

StaticMatic will set up a basic site structure for you with this command:

staticmatic setup <directory>

After this command you'll have the following files:

<directory>/
  site/
    images/
    stylesheets/
    javascripts/
  src/
    helpers/
    layouts/
      application.haml
    pages/
      index.haml
    stylesheets/
      application.sass

StaticMatic sets you up with a sample layout, stylesheet and page file. Once you've edited the pages and stylesheets, you can generate the static site:

staticmatic build <directory>

All of the pages are parsed and wrapped up in application.haml and put into the site directory.

StaticMatic adds a few helpers to the core Haml helpers:

= link 'Title', 'url'
= img 'my_image.jpg'