After couple of months of hacking, I finally released Phrozn version 0.2. I had to cut down the feature list as there are quite a lot of things I want to do and not that much time I can dedicate at the moment. Still, I think the release enhances Phrozn project in several ways, so let me tell you what’s new in.. well, new version of Phrozn:

Content Providers

When working on yet another side-project of mine – ZFCasts (podcast show in Russian where me and my friends speculate on Zend Framework) – I was immediately stuck, as there was no way I can inject (programmatically) my own content into the pages. Basically, I had an RSS feed with all the contents of the show, and what I needed was some means to integrate that RSS’s contents into my templates.

That’s when Content Providers were created. If you are used to some other static site generators (in Ruby and Python) you might know those beasts under the “Generators” name. Why on earth I named them “Content Providers” is something I don’t have answer for, so let’s just stick with the term.

Right now you can have better control on the variables used within your templates. Basically, you can inject anything – RSS, hard-coded data, result of the call to some external web-service. Coupled with the fact that you can put your phr up job into cron, you have quite good mechanism of keeping your site updated.

For full info, please, check the official documentation.

Phrozn Bundles

My original aim and one of the top priorities (if not the most important one) is to make contribution not only possible but an easy and fun process. If someone is cool enough to contribute some text processor – that must be possible without diving into the Phrozn internals.

On par with that goal, I introduced so-called bundles. Bundles are basically some directories in standardized format, that you can archive (into .tgz format) and start distributing to other Phrozn users. I wanted as simple and transparent mechanism of 3rd party code contribution as possible.

Therefore, I launched the Phrozn Bundles repository on GitHub, so that you can fork it, write your bundle, and send me a pull request (I will take care of archiving and registering it with core Phrozn program). Once done, any Phrozn user will be able to install your bundle as easy as typing:

        phr bundle apply your-bundle-name

By the way, bundles can be very useful even if you can’t contribute them back – they give you very simple way to transfer styles, themes, plugins between several phr installations.

For more info, please, see

I did number of other changes and bug fixes (changelog), but Bundles and Content Providers are by far the most important additions to the stack.

Finally..

Should you find any issue, please let me know. If you don’t find issue but think Phrozn is useful, let me know too :) )

One last thing for today’s post. Huge thanks to Phrozn’s early contributors that helped me nailing down the bugs:

Thank you guys, and looking forward to seeing even more contributors in upcoming releases!

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I am really happy to announce new little project of mine – Phrozn.

For quite some time I have been using static site generators written in Ruby an Python. In many cases, static site is exactly what you want. Consider blogs, manuals/books, info pages.

Given the scale of how client-side technologies (such as JavaScript) evolved, most of dynamic functionality can be implemented using client-side scripts + remote web-services (e.g. Disqus for comments). More than often we a going down that road even on our completely dynamic sites – it makes things more simple.

I am not saying that platforms such as WordPress are going down. I don’t think so. But I think there are many people, just like me, that do not use more than 1% of WordPress functionality, and as such I simply do not need the whole WP for publishing in my blog.

All I need is to write some article in my favorite editor (Vim), run some tool which will wrap entry into layout, add styles and whistles, and publish the entry. Right now, on this very blog, I don’t see any feature I can not have with

        static site generator + JavaScript + some well-known service

And the clear benefit for me is relying on my favorite editor (I HATE text-area editors). Coupled with format independence (I can write my entry in HTML, or Twig, or Textile, or Markdown or any other esoteric beast), I get an ideal solution for my simple needs.

Other thing to consider is resources. Running WordPress is certainly way more resource-expensive (both CPU and RAM) than having static web site. For me this means I can have all my projects on medium server with more simple maintenance and caching strategies.

All this is good, but I couldn’t find any static site generators in PHP. Given the amount of generators in other languages I was surprised. So, I decided to create one myself, that’s how Phrozn project was born :)

It is in early stages of development, but is already quite usable. Please check out documentation and let me know if you have any questions.

P.S. I will move this blog into Phrozn pretty soon, so that you have yet another example of “phrozn site” (source code of phrozn.info site is available on GitHub).