This is a static site generator for my personal (browser) homepage. It's not fully genericized but can be simply modified to suit anyone else's similar needs. The only prerequisite for this system is bash 4.
See content/index.post.sh and content/index.html for a simple example. There are no
automatic loops or anything like that. Simply fill out the content property to provide
a reference to the html file with the contents to be included in the template, filename
for the output path. Additionally, default properties are included in content/default.sh,
including the default template template.html.
Once your files are in place, you can run make build to build the html files, make sync
to rsync the files to the location specified in the makefile in the SYNC_TARGET variable,
and make clean to delete everything in the build dir build.
Or, simply run make to all those steps in order.
<% key %>includes the specified key in$docvarsin the document.<$ echo some bash $>iseval'd in the same loop, in the scope of the main bash script.
Anything named .func.sh in src is included in src/index.sh. A good pattern is writing custom code and including it here instead of in templates themselves, not only from a readability perspective, but because I'm pretty sure the parser I wrote will fall over if you run it in the same room as a bottle of vermouth.
There are routines for enumerating the various rendered items and doing things like building RSS files, for example.