What's New in 3.4

StaticForge 3.4.0 adds site-wide feeds, a dev server that rebuilds and reloads for you, a proper 404 page, and safeguards that stop a bad deploy from wiping your site. Everything new is opt-in or only changes something that was already broken. Various bug and security fixes are included as well.

Site-wide feeds

StaticForge has always written one RSS feed per category. 3.4 can also write a feed for the whole site, in three formats:

Format	Address
RSS 2.0	`/feed.xml`
Atom 1.0	`/feed.atom`
JSON Feed 1.1	`/feed.json`

Your category feeds are not touched. Same address, same content, so podcast feeds keep working exactly as before. Categories can also get Atom and JSON versions alongside their rss.xml, if you ask for them.

Turn the site feeds on in siteconfig.yaml:

feed:
  enabled: true

They are off by default for existing sites, and on for sites created with site:init. Drafts, noindex pages, the 404 page and generated pages are left out. So is any category whose definition file has podcast: true, because the site feeds cannot carry podcast enclosures. The bundled themes add the autodiscovery <link> tags for you, and custom themes get a feed_links variable. See RSS Feed for every option.

Dev server with live reload

site:devserver --watch watches your content, templates and configuration. When you save a file it rebuilds and reloads the open browser tab.

A small "Rebuilding..." note appears while it works.
If a build fails, a banner shows the error and the last good version keeps being served.
Builds are incremental, and deleting a source file triggers a clean build so no orphan pages linger.

lando php bin/staticforge.php site:devserver --watch

Set SITE_BASE_URL in .env to the dev server address (for example http://localhost:8000/) while you work, so your CSS and JavaScript load from it. See Dev Server and Live Reload.

A 404 page

The staticforce and sample themes now include a 404 template. Create content/404.md with template: 404 and StaticForge builds public/404.html. It has a search box (in staticforce) and a list of popular sections you can set with 404_links in siteconfig.yaml.

make:htaccess adds the matching ErrorDocument 404 /404.html line.
The dev server serves the page with a real 404 status.
audit:live checks that your live site answers unknown addresses with a 404, not a redirect or a 200.
site:init writes a sample content/404.md for new sites.

See 404 Pages.

Safer deploys

site:upload has a new safety net:

--no-delete uploads but never deletes anything on the server.
If a run would delete more files than the larger of 10 or a quarter of what you last deployed (or your own upload.max_delete), it stops before deleting anything and asks. In a cron job or CI it stops with a failure exit code instead. --force-delete overrides it.
Files that were held back, or that failed to delete, are remembered and cleaned up on a later run.

See Deploy Safety.

Smaller improvements

Sitemap and robots.txt: pages with sitemap: false, noindex: true or robots: no are left out of sitemap.xml, and lastmod uses updated, then date, then the file's modified time. Both bundled themes add a noindex meta tag for noindex: true pages.
Search: search.json is written compactly. On this site it dropped from 319 KB to 274 KB.
Audits: audit:config validates the new feed and upload settings.

Upgrading

Update StaticForge and run site:render. Nothing else is required.
To use site feeds, add feed: with enabled: true to siteconfig.yaml. If you publish a podcast, put podcast: true in the category's definition file so its episodes stay out of the site feeds.
To add a 404 page, create content/404.md (see 404 Pages) and run make:htaccess to get the Apache line.
audit:live now makes two extra requests to check for a real 404. A site that answers 200 or redirects for a missing page will fail that check.
If you rely on a symbolic link inside public/ while using the dev server, copy the files instead. Links that point outside the output folder now return 404.

Coming later

Two things are planned for 3.5: moving to PHP's newer built-in HTML parser, and an atomic deploy mode that switches to the new version of your site in one step.