Mario, great work, although I primarily use TiddlyWiki interactively now days and are unlikely to generate static sites, I have long felt that the export static tiddlers or site is a useful but somewhat limited tool, doing this to “activate tabs” is a good enhancement.
Despite the current limitations which you have made “roads into” I have felt that the template system and the possibilities for such exports do demonstrate well some of the possibilities. As you may know we can use the Innerwiki plugin to generate whole tiddlywikis so anything between a static tiddler and a full wiki is possible. Arguably all we need is custom templates.
My own work in this area was to alter the static template so all “internal links” on static pages loaded the tiddler in the interactive wiki. Something I thought should be the default behaviour.
Never the less I do believe as a community we could develop these features to generate even more sophisticated websites, even interactive ones with live Javascript. To assist in this endeavour we could make use of tools and config to;
- Export multiple generated output files through a zip
- this could even include images and other files.
- Allow the domain to be set on each output file enabling relative file references
<head>... <base href="https://example.com/subfolder/"> ... </head>
- The ability to provide suitable navigation over the top of multiple file exports,
- A kind of menu bar equivalent, or even “translate” the meu bar to a static menu included with every exported tiddler.
- Build a set of common tiddler → website templates adapted to common types of page found on the internet.
- A revision system so with updates we need only export changed pages, then unzip on the site.
- TiddlyWiki can then remain a repository of methods and metadata to generate a classic website.
I have often felt it unnecessary when exporting tiddlers for them to carry the display CSS that looks like tiddlers, when they could become something more.
- perhaps there are other TiddlyWiki elements that could be effectively exported as you have done with tabs?
Some food for thought.