After wanting to learn how to use Python in Houdini, I went digging. I found some good content on YouTube, and lots on GitHub. The theme of it is that there was lots to learn, but it was scattered between many places. This is why I started HouPy Wiki.

The goal was to a have a central place for content like this, where anyone could make a pull request and have content added to the site. They would be credited and could help build a central content bank.

I have been slowly adding to it over the last few years, and recently I launched "12 Days of Python", an advent calendar themed exercise aimed at taking someone from 0 to comfortable in Python in Houdini.

Nerdy stuff

I built the site to pull from markdown files, as I figured it would be easiest for other users to contribute their own, since it's basically just words and a few symbols here and there.

The site was made using NextJS, and I styled it using TailwindCSS (my beloved). All of the pages are SSG (Static Site Generation), so there is no "backend" running, and because it's hosted on Vercel, I can easily push changes and have new articles up fast.

The main content pages are parsed from markdown with react-markdown, and I opted with a bit of a weird structure:

content
├── Python_Panels
│ ├── 00_Getting Started.md
│ └── 01_Layout_Building.md

Maybe its a bit backwards, but it allowed me to have a Python Panels page, and inside of it, articles for each of the items, which made it easier to manage and cleaner to read.

Other than that, it was built with some Radix UI unstyled components, which just helped me avoid having to write my own dropdown menus.

And so, HouPy Wiki was born!

Pive, Paugh, Python.