How do I integrate nanoc and Twitter Bootstrap/Zurb Foundation?

Question

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~

Answer 1

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.