Stefan Koopmanschap has a new post to his site showing the Sculpin users out there how to customize the system for a highlight image and Facebook integration.

Over the past months I've been slowly customizing my Sculpin installation for this blog to fit my own liking a bit more. I've added a bit more styling including a beautiful background image and a transparent white background for the content column. Today I wanted to add a bit more. Two things specifically: I wanted to control a bit more about how my blogposts are displayed when they are shared on Facebook [and] I wanted to have an optional image at the top of blogposts to make them look a bit better.

It turns out this was actually quite easy, so here's a short description of what I did to make it work.

He splits the article into these two parts, showing how to add in custom markup and add custom frontmatter to modify the Facebook posts. He then shows how to add a block to the main templates for the highlight image and a small section to credit the photo back to the original.

For those Sculpin users out there Matthias Noback has posted a tip showing how to make the tool skip certain sources so it's not included in the build. This is useful for removing files that may not be needed in the final result. In his case, he wanted to slim down his Docker image and only include exactly what was needed for the site it hosts.

Whenever I run the Sculpin generate command to generate a new version of the static website that is this blog, I notice there are a lot of useless files that get copied from the project's source/ directory to the project's output/ directory. All the files in the output/ directory will eventually get copied into a Docker image based on nginx (see also my blog series on Containerizing a static website with Docker). And since I'm on a hotel wifi now, I realized that now was the time to shave off any unnecessary weight from this Docker image.

After some searching around he found the best solution for his needs - a custom hook into Sculpin's own events system with a "before run" event. He includes the code he used to create a SkipSources event that uses pattern matches to exclude the requested sources. Then, using the fnmatch function he generated a listing of files to pass in to be skipped. After working up this solution, a bit more research also lead to another possible, more built-in way: the ignore configuration key that also uses pattern matching.

Stefan Koopmanschap has written up a tutorial on his site introducing the use of Docker and Sculpin to create an easily reproducible and manageable blogging setup.

I've been running this blog on Sculpin for quite a while now, and I'm quite happy with how that works. We've been in a process of migrating some of our websites off a standard VPS towards a setup with Docker, Gitlab CI and Rancher. I've now migrated some websites, which is relatively easy, but most of those sites were dynamic PHP websites. Migrating a site that generates static HTML and running that is a slightly different thing. Here's how I ended up doing it.

First he covers his old setup - essentially the manual run of a shell command to generate the latest version of a the static Sculpin site. He decided to update the process and help makes things more automatic using Docker and a Gitlab pipeline flow. He then documents his attempts and configuration options as he built up the Docker configuration he wanted. This ultimately resulted in a Docker setup that installed PHP and Nginx to serve up the site, Composer to load in the required dependencies (like Sculpin) and the commands to "deploy" the latest version of the site publicly.

Matthias Noback has continued his series looking at using Sculpin to create static pages for "in-project documentation" with this second post focusing more on the creation of "virtual pages". These pages allow the insertion of dynamic content into pages pulled from other sources (in this case, from the source of the project).

Previously we looked at how to use the static site generator Sculpin to generate in-project documentation. When Sculpin builds the HTML files and assets it looks at what files are in the source/ directory and processes them based on certain rules (e.g. "parse Markdown files", "format HTML files with Twig", etc.). The purpose for my "living documentation" project is to also dynamically generate documentation based on PHP and configuration files from the main project.

[...] The Sculpin documentation mentions several ways to generate dynamic content for a static site, as opposed to the standard way of adding static Markdown or HTML files. [...] So, I dug into the source code of Sculpin to find out what would be a reasonable extension point. It turned out that the best way to approach this was to create a custom data source (which is currently not documented).

He then walks you through the creation of a custom data source with "dataSourceId" and "refresh" methods the tool uses to pull in the dynamic data. He shows how to set up the script to be called at any time and have the same effect (Sculpin does this when the "server" is running) and defining the service in your Sculpin configuration.

Matthias Noback has a recent post to his site sharing some advice and examples of how to use Sculpin for your project's documentation to make it a quick and pretty painless process.

One of the key ideas is to generate documentation instead of writing it. This should help prevent duplication and outdated information that is not trust-worthy and would therefore be neglected. I'm currently looking for ways to technically accomplish such a thing with PHP projects. This should result in reusable tools which will make it easier and more fun to document future projects while writing the code.

[...] I wanted to use Sculpin to document another project, the main project. So I started figuring out how to run Sculpin and generate a static subsite (not a blog) based on files in a subdirectory of another project. It wasn't all that hard, but I'll share the steps here anyway.

He walks you through the creation of a new Sculpin-based site and how to test and ensure it's all working correctly with simple content, a layout and configuration. He finishes out the post mentioning the themes available for Scuplin applications and links to the Bootstrap 3 theme as an example.

On the Sculpin blog Beau Simensen has posted an update about a change in how the project will be released in the future, most notably deprecating the phar release and switching to an embedded Composer installation.

If you are currently using a globally installed phar distribution for Sculpin you should migrate to a per-project Composer installed version of Sculpin as soon as you can. [...] Any plans for Sculpin 3 would have required reworking the phar build and distribution process

In typical programmer fashion, I let myself get bogged down in the details of eventually needing to deploy Sculpin 3 phar builds rather than working on Sculpin 3. What little time I had to spend on Sculpin last year was sunk on solving this problem. [...] The last officially available Sculpin phar is not compatible with PHP 7.

He talks about his earlier goals to make v3 of Sculpin PHP 7-only but, in the process of the work to get to that point, several roadblocks came up preventing it. He talks about self-updating phars and finally realizing that, for the good of the project, a move to the embedded Composer setup is the best method for keeping dependencies in sync. He ends the post with the steps you'll need to take to migrate from the phar release to the managed version and an example commit of how the Sculpin site itself was migrated.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted helping those Sculpin users out there get the most from their site with some helpful customization tips. Sculpin is a PHP-based static site generation tool that converts Mardon files and Twig templates into HTML documents ready for use.

If you’re a PHP developer and currently running a blog with a static site generator such as Octopress or Jekyll, wouldn’t it be great if you could use your primary language for it? Yes, it’s healthy for us developers to use more than one language, but let’s be honest – we often want to add some functionality to our blogs, but it’s difficult to accomplish in unfamiliar syntax. In this article, we’ll set up Sculpin, a static site generator for PHP. Just like any other static site generator, it uses markdown files and HTML templates to generate your blog, so the transition should be easy.

The tutorial starts by helping you get Sculpin installed (as a phar executable) and move it to where it's globally accessible. With that installed the article then helps you make a simple blog, customize some of the basic settings and start in on a new blog post. With that in place it then gets into the customization, adding in:

• syntax highlighting
• Disqus commenting
• blog archive links

The post finishes up showing you how to deploy the resulting blog into a GitHub pages repository and pushing them out for public consumption.

Cees-Jan Kiewiet has written up a post showing how he combines S3 and CircleCI to deploy a Sculpin site for his blog. Sculpin is a popular PHP-based static site generator.

Until 10 minutes before the start of this month I had a VPS at Digital Ocean running with Jenkins and Gitolite on it for privately hosted repositories. With Github's recent move to unlimited repositories I really didn't have a need to host them myself anymore, and after playing with CircleCI's free tier it didn't make any sense anymore to keep that VPS up.

Since porting git over to another remote is as more Github's domain we're focusing on deploying Sculpin to S3 using CircleCI in this post.

He starts by outlining some of the prerequisites to get in place before trying to set up the process on your own application. He shows you how to set up an IAM user for the S3 bucket and configure CircleCI though a simple YAML file. He also mentions the set up for tests, loading in other dependencies needed (Composer) and finally the deployment that executes Sculpin's "generate" command to build the site.

Jack Skinner has a new post to his site showing how he rewrote his blog aiming for simplicity with the help of Sculpin and Codeship.

I’ve recently relaunched my blog (hi everyone!), I’ll migrate some old content and scrap others. While I clean up the content however I wanted to share how the new site has come into being.

He starts off talking about why he chose to go with Sculpin but doesn't get too much into it as there are "plenty of posts and content around" on how to get started. He then talks about the Codeship service and share some of the initial setup commands and setting up a deployment pipeline to an AWS instance. He makes use of the S3 website hosting, Route53 and CloudFront services for the serving of the actual site. Codeship makes it simple to deploy a new build whenever he updates or adds a new post too.

The Three Devs & A Maybe podcast has posted their latest episode today: Episode #41, an interview with Beau Simensen where they talk about his Sculpin project and his contributions to the Stack project.

This week we are very lucky to have Beau Simensen on the show to discuss all things Stack, Sculpin and podcasting. [...] We touch upon how Beau got into programming, and his progression through Perl to PHP. We then move on to how Stack and Sculpin came to being, and the problems they are each trying to solve. Finally we talk about an upcoming Symfony Live event in London that he will be presenting at (on Stack), and Edd will be attending.

Other topics mentioned include PHP-FIG, an article about the value of the HTTP Foundation component and a video of a presentation from Igor Wiedler about Stack. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. You can also subscribe to their feed to get this latest episode and others as they're released.