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I am making a fairly big website. Mostly on culture of a particular place.

  1. Are static sites a good idea?

  2. How do I integrate nanoc and some framework? There are a couple of github repos on this, but I wanted to this from scratch in order to learn. Otherwise, I am afraid I might not be able to fix something that goes wrong later.

PLease help~

Max
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  • Looks like Nanoc can play nicely with Rails: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/nanoc/JTi4Z_OUmkw – Narfanator Jun 10 '13 at 01:17
  • You might also look at rails engines, since they let you embed other apps (rails or otherwise) in rails. – Narfanator Jun 10 '13 at 01:18
  • Before thinking about Bootstrap vs Foundation, I would think about the pros and cons of a CMS vs a static site. It seems to me, the more you go towards a 'fairly big website', the more you should think about using a CMS solution. – David Taiaroa Jun 17 '13 at 11:04
  • Thanks ! I am thinking of Mezzanine/Django instead now. If nothing else works, wordpress! – Max Jun 18 '13 at 19:50

1 Answers1

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I've recently decided to make a reasonably sized site using nanoc and Zurb Foundation myself, so I can tell you my thoughts on this:

  1. A static site is a good idea in many situations, but they do have obvious limitations (with everything being static!). The typical use of a static generator like nanoc is for a blog, for which most of the limitations aren't a problem (especially with services like Disqus for comments). I personally decided to use nanoc to save hosting/maintenance costs initially (using Amazon S3 to host a static site is cheap and scalable compared to a VPS), because I don't need any of the dynamic stuff yet, and to learn something new!

  2. I've written a few posts on my blog (link in my profile) about how I've integrated foundation from scratch with nanoc. I can't comment for bootstrap, but my steps were:

    • Use the nanoc tutorial to create a site
    • Use compass to integrate foundation into your site, by creating a compass.rb that has a require "zurb-foundation" line as well as config for your asset paths (mine is here)
    • Run a compass install foundation -c compass.rb to populate the foundation stylesheets, images and javascripts into your asset directories
    • Update your Rules file to include compass, and process the stylesheets accordingly

That is a high-level overview - there's step-by-step detail on my blog if you're interested in going the foundation route.

Colin Bradley
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  • Thanks. I am still struggling with it. I'll post some more questions. – Max Jun 15 '13 at 07:50
  • Could you please link your Blog as well? – Max Jun 18 '13 at 19:51
  • Sure - it's [here](http://chickenboot.com/2013/05/18/zurb-foundation-with-nanoc-part-1/). It's a bit rough around the edges, but hopefully it will help. Let me know if not! – Colin Bradley Jun 19 '13 at 19:16