Newcomen A Static Website Generator Written In Perl

Newcomen1 is a plugin-driven static content generator, written in Perl. With the plugins included in the distribution it becomes a full-fledged static blog generator, or — if the blog features are not required — simply a static website generator. It works much like Jekyll (written in Ruby) or Hyde (written in Python).

Newcomen’s blog plugins are very flexible, and basically every aspect of the generated website can be configured freely. The plugins may also be used to generate a simple (non-blog) website, while still keeping the actual content separate from the page templates. Of course, blog and non-blog content may be mixed as required.

Newcomen uses Template Toolkit as template engine, and article sources may be written in MultiMarkdown format. Support for other template engines and markup formats can be implemented easily if required.

Newcomen is free software, licensed under the GNU GPLv3.


  1. Newcomen was originally called Utterson, but there already was another static blog generator called Utterson, so it has been renamed to Newcomen. Like Utterson, the name Newcomen is based on a character name from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. According to the Wikipedia article (version from May 23, 2014):

    Utterson joins this Scotland Yard inspector [this refers to Newcomen] after the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. They explore Hyde’s loft in Soho and discover evidence of his depraved life.

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