pythonmercurialsinatranancy

Recommendation for very lightweight website framework

I want to update/rewrite a small (10 page), simple website; 8 pages are entirely static and could be written in html, 1 page has a contact form and the other has to display a filterable list of clubs. At the moment the site is written in classic asp and uses dreamweaver templates for consistent pages.

My requirements are

  1. A "masterpage" / Templating system, so all shared page elements are written in only 1 place.
  2. Lightweight / low overhead framework
  3. To learn a new language

I could use ASP.NET Webforms or ASP.NET MVC to get the masterpage, but they both come with overhead that isn't necessary for such a small site and on my godaddy hosting spinning up a site from cold is noticeably slower than a pure html page.

The clubs page will show a list of clubs filterable by location, but I don't want to use a database to store this list - there is another site that has the official list of clubs, but the system isn't capable of providing this as a service or other consumable resource so I would need to scrape the details periodically and cache them locally or use an iframe or something

I thought maybe Python or django might be good candidates but don't know enough to know. I now think that what I'm looking for is a "micro web framework". I've taken a quick look at the Mercurial Web Server which is written in python and that looks quite straightforward, but I don't have access to the hosted web server on Go Daddy, so can't install python...

Edit
I need this to run on my current shared hosting with GoDaddy on (IIS7)

Edit2
The list of clubs is maintained by the official HQ website, they occasionally add / remove clubs. I just need to keep my list up to date with theirs. I have been checking every few months (if I remember) and updating an MS SQL database, but that's hugely over the top. I was thinking of just pulling the details down into a json format and persisting it in a text file (once a month, or something) which I could then use as the basis of a table with jQuery filtering on. The club details are just text; Name of Club, Main contact, phone number, address and email address.

I would also like publishing to be simple, commit the code to Mercurial (or git) and have that run the site. I know bitbucket (and github) both serve static page sites (I'm not sure how I would get a contact us form to work in that environment - but it's the deployment model I would like)

The site I am looking to update is Seika Dojo

Solution

  • Well, I don't know about the other frameworks, but I have good experiences building a small site in NancyFx.

    1. NancyFx supports multiple view engines. You could use the SuperSimpleViewEngine; masterpages come out of the box.
    2. Getting started with Nancy is super easy.
    3. I think you already know .NET/C#, but Nancy takes a lot of advantage of new dynamic features which are fun to play with.