stakx 0.1.0 "Immortal Wombat"

March 03, 2017 • allejo

After approximately a year of development, I'm proud to announce the first stable release of stakx, codenamed "Immortal Wombat," and an official website! I'm comfortable with the current state of stakx to mark it stable; as with any piece of software, it's not free of bugs so please help by reporting any issues you may find.

stakx is a new player to the static site generator market and takes a different approach compared to a lot of current generators. The documentation is currently being worked on but there are websites being built with stakx already and the main repository has an example website. Unlike other tools, stakx is distributed as a single executable available on the releases page so there's no need to pull dependencies with bundle or composer!

So, how do you use it? It's as simple as downloading the PHAR and running the build command:

./stakx.phar build

So what's the current status?

stakx has a lot of features ready and tested but there are also some features that are still experimental or missing.

Awesome features already in place

FrontMatter variables
Dynamic and Repeater PageViews
Themes can work as submodules and can be isolated by design
Twig filters and functions available to organize data

No asset compilation

There's no support for compiling SCSS or CoffeeScript or any other superset languages. There are plans for it in the future, however using a tool such as Gulp or Webpack is the recommended approach right now.

No `new` command

There's currently no way to create an example website for you to start work immediately. You would have to create the project structure from scratch or clone an existing stakx website and build from there. This is something that will definitely be worked on in the 0.1.x branch.

Watching the website during development

The watch command is still in an experimental feature and has a few known issues:

If a Twig template is extended by another template and the parent template is updated, stakx will detect the change but, due to caching, those changes are not compiled unless the watch command is started again (#14)
If a template refers to a collection in a specific way, then the respective PageViews won't be rebuilt when ContentItems or DataItems are changed (#16)

Behind the codename