Tangential Related: how do people use static site generators (SSG) when they have more than 1 team member who's publishing site updates? Are they having the SSG trigger off of a git push?
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Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
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Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
#22Tangential Related: how do people use static site generators (SSG) when they have more than 1 team member who's publishing site updates? Are they having the SSG trigger off of a git push?
Yup, most SSGs have pretty good support for GitHub actions or other CI tools.
Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
#23Zola seem the most popular static site generator that allows you to generate a website without any JS bundle without using some strange hack. This is the way I firstly stumbled upon it as I was looking for a fast way to generate a fully static site with the advantages of a generator and none of the overheads... It may be limited for certain use cases but I think it would be my first choice for editing a static site w…
Pelican can easily generate no-JS websites. If a theme doesn't include JS, there won't be any, and (wild guess) half the themes don't. It's also extremely easy to tweak most themes not to use JS.
Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
#24I'm using Hugo, but was looking at Zola earlier today.
It's great to see that they're looking to support next-generation image formats. They're not in Hugo, as a requirement seems to be that dependencies are all fully written in Go, no use of bindings. It's a sensible decision from a maintenance perspective, but still unfortunate.
What Hugo does have, and for which I couldn't find an alternative for in Zola, is something akin to `esbuild` that can build and bundle JavaScript and TypeScript. Is there some way to do this with Zola or does one need to setup a separate build step for that with e.g. `swc`?
Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
#25I though this was about the wedding registry site at first. Anyway, I liked this line from the Github: > Hugo gets ehh for the template engine because while it is probably the most powerful template engine in the list (after Jinja2) it personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator. Yes, this is a bit biased. This seems to be the life cycle of static site generat…
I think I’m just going to write a HTTP server for my website in Go, download the entire website with wget and host that statically. At least that way I can have any feature I want.
Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
#26What is stopping someone writing an offline GUI for a static site generator? I think that would help a bit with non-technical adoption.
If you can run a local web server, WordPress has a static site generator: https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/
Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
#27I though this was about the wedding registry site at first. Anyway, I liked this line from the Github: > Hugo gets ehh for the template engine because while it is probably the most powerful template engine in the list (after Jinja2) it personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator. Yes, this is a bit biased. This seems to be the life cycle of static site generat…
Perhaps we need a meta ssg. An ssgg if you will. Perhaps a dsl for specifying ssgs.
Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
#28I tried Zola and liked the speed and simplicity. However support for its templating language is scarce and I'm not super keen on writing extensions in Rust. I have also looked at Hugo, which is determined to uphold evil and suffering by using Go's horrible templating minilanguage; Nanoc, which is cool but at times inscrutable and perhaps a little too obscure; now I'm playing with Jekyll. In short I am doing everythin…
I went from Jekyll to Hugo, because, although Jekyll was great at first, as the numbers of pages grew it for slower and slower until it was taking about a minute to compile. Switched to Hugo and compilation takes about 2s for the same site. On the other hand, yeah, there's lots of other frustrations - besides the weird templating stuff, they have one of the least friendly and helpful dev teams I've come across when I've occasionally asked a question on their forum.
Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
#29I though this was about the wedding registry site at first. Anyway, I liked this line from the Github: > Hugo gets ehh for the template engine because while it is probably the most powerful template engine in the list (after Jinja2) it personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator. Yes, this is a bit biased. This seems to be the life cycle of static site generat…
Indeed I guess there are so many SSG because it's so easy to create one. In fact it might take as much time or even less to build one than it does to learn all the quirks and bugs of an existing one.
Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
#30I keep trying to return to Zola but it seems I have to do much of the work there myself. It's kind of the other end of the spectrum for me: too much freedom! I wouldn't mind some convention-over-configuration there. Also the templating language isn't at all intuitive to me but it might be just me being stupid.
But I also want multi-lingual articles and article revisions so maybe Zola is not for me.
I absolutely love it how lightning fast it is, though, and I am sad that I still couldn't bring myself to learn it. These days my bandwidth (and desire) to invest fully in a new tool is at minimal values. :(
I think Zola would get much more traction if it had several typical cases covered in the tutorials: not only blogs but simple company pages, semi-informal technical docs, and the like.
Can somebody recommend something as fast as Zola but with more features -- or just it being much easier to learn? And don't say Hugo; it is really easy to start with but the moment you get off the beaten path you are looking at days of effort to modify your site.