What is Urubu?
Urubu is a tool to build static websites. The following sections will help you to decide whether it is the right tool for you.
Static versus dynamic
A static website is the simple case. It consists of a set of fixed pages. The only job of the web server is to serve the page that you request.
The opposite is a dynamic website. In this case, you interact with a program on the web server. Depending on the request, the web server program generates a response page on the fly.
Clearly, a dynamic website supports a much more interactive and sophisticated web experience. If this is what you need, you should consider a full-fledged CMS or CMS generator tool. There is a wide choice of them in the Python world.
On the other hand, a static website is great for performance, security and maintainability. If you don't need the overhead of a dynamic CMS, it is a wise choice.
Why a tool?
One option is to write a static website by hand by editing the html code for each page. However, this quickly becomes an unpractical solution for two reasons.
First, writing html is no fun. The markup overhead is error prone and makes it difficult to read the actual content. In Urubu, you use Markdown for authoring instead. Markdown is an almost zero overhead input format and feels like a natural way to write content in plain text.
Secondly, html pages have a lot of non-content overhead that is equal or similar across pages, such as navigation info. Duplicating and maintaining this info manually is error prone and time consuming. In Urubu, you use templates (also known as layouts) instead. They make it easy to define the common html structure of a set of similar pages.
Why Urubu?
There is no shortage of static web site generators, including a lot of Python solutions. However, these tools are typically blog oriented. If your website is primarily a blog, with content in reverse chronological order and with good support for tagging and archiving, there are many other solutions than Urubu.
On the other hand, if you view your website as a set of logically connected content pages, Urubu is an excellent choice. Urubu makes it it easy to define a good navigation structure, so that a user is never "lost". This is especially important for technical content.
Of course, you can also include a blog in an Urubu site. Within a folder, you can specify how the content should be ordered using an arbitrary key. For a blog, this would be reverse order by date.
Urubu's ideal use case
If you would like to develop a website like a software project, you will feel at home with Urubu. For example, you can maintain an Urubu site in a git or mercurial repository and use the workflows that these systems enable. For example, you can collaborate on GitHub or Bitbucket through pull requests. Also, deployment can be as straightforward as pushing to an upstream repository.