Content and Static Sites
With the advent of server-side frameworks and content management systems, it is possible to build sites whose source of truth is a spreadsheet! This demo explores a number of approaches.
Flow​
At its core, the site generators provide a structure for supplying content and templates. During a publish step, the generators will analyze the content and generate web pages by applying the template to the content. It is spiritually similar to "Mail Merge".
This separation of content and presentation makes it easy for analysts and other spreadsheet users to generate files with their data and quickly update websites!
Live Reload​
Many frameworks offer a development flow which watches files for changes. When using a spreadsheet as the data source, this allows the content creators to see updates in a preview environment as they make changes to the spreadsheet!
The following GIF animation shows a static site generator in development mode. The user is editing a spreadsheet with Numbers. Every time the page is saved, the browser refreshes to show the new content.
Ecosystem​
It is strongly recommended to use a telemetry-free framework that provides an official plugin for working with SheetJS.
Lume is a great choice for lightweight sites.
Official​
Some frameworks provide official extensions. They are strongly recommended for greenfield projects.
Bundlers​
Bundlers can run JS code and process assets during development and during site builds. Custom plugins can extract data from spreadsheets.
Workarounds​
Other site generators require workarounds for various limitations and assumptions: