webTemplate

2026-09-01

In 2023 I joined the board of SVVolta (Student Society Volta). The last board made a website with the website maker of the web host they chose, but we did not have money or any income (they also started the organization). This host was also quite expensive, so I took the task to move the website to a cheaper host, but this means making a new website.

As a board, we decided to move to WordPress because it was known by people and easy to edit the content for the less technical people. Because I am too much of a perfectionist, I wanted to create my own theme to have full control over how the website looked. I have never done it before, how hard can it be... well, harder than I thought. I did not manage to make a working website when the contract of the last host ended, so I had to improvise a solution, a 'temporary' solution, which definitely did not end up being the solution for many years to come...

Let's for now just have a single-page website as a single HTML file. Just to extend the time I have to work on the WordPress theme. I did enjoy making the simple HTML site, but not the WordPress theme. So I continued to 'extend' the time by making a template in Jinja2. To generate multiple webpages. This is where the temporary solution started to extend it's definition. Because this template has a script to generate all the pages, which transformed into the current solution.

The beginning of the not-so-temporary solution

An engine that converts Markdown into HTML using Jinja2 templates. With a template for every Markdown component to have complete control over how it generates the HTML. A system with this amount of control is a system I've been looking for for quite a while now, and now I already have a start and the architecture in mind, I think I can make this!

I stated a new project called WebTemplate and begun the search for a good library I can use to parse the Markdown and start the foundation for usage in the SVVolta's website. It is currently used for this website, and soon it's templates and source will be open source, but for now only WebTemplates's code is open source. I am still upgrading the system to be more flexible for other stuff apart from websites.