Update - 10th June 14: I’ve extracted the JSON parsing features from the following code into a metalsmith plugin, metalsmith-json, whcih is now available on github and npm A few weeks ago, I read about Metalsmith, a neat looking static site generator. More recently I was looking at ways of improving an internal static site we maintain as a gateway to download and install mobile artifacts. It seemed like a good opportunity to play with Metalsmith and I’d like to talk through my experience.

Last year we migrated our build system for a multi platform cordova app to Grunt from ant. It was great. Well, actually it was just quite good. See, whilst I’m really not a fan of ant, the ant task graph is nice. It upsets me that I can’t express branching task dependencies in Grunt. ####The problem In this case we wanted to do a bunch of common setup once then do n platform specific steps for n platforms.