I just added in some really powerful functionality to Nift which I’m pretty sure wont work through Snap without being granted classic confinement.
Two things I’ve added in are:
- support for pre-post build/serve scripts, so users can provide scripts to be run before or after building/serving their website;
- added @script, @scriptoutput, @system and @systemoutput syntax to the template language so that users can run scripts/system commands and inject the output of scripts/system commands when building webpages
This is useful for things like:
- injecting content from a url when building using cURL (currently doesn’t work through Snap)
- integrating with things like SASS, Grunt, Live Server/Reload (hot/live reloading) and all sorts of other programs, not all of which will be known before the user tries to integrate with them which requires classic confinement, plus packaging all those things when they aren’t needed would be a HUGE turnoff;
- integrating with databases and any scripting language the user wants (can’t package Nift with all scripting languages, that would be inefficient and make it ridiculously large)
Despite having a low install count currently, I think Nift is worth Snap having in their store. It’s three times faster than the previous world’s fastest website generator, compact (source code is under 150kb in size and can be compiled in to an executable under 300kb in size, about 24mb with Snap as it comes packaged with Git), integrates with basically any framework, has a growing variety of ready made templates available (and it’s easy to take existing websites and turn them in to Nift templates), along with all sorts of other selling points you can read on the homepage of https://nift.cc