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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

#101

Post by cpach »

bookmarkable wrote: post #99

My input as a former technologist turned marketing guy over the years - where is a decent SSG (perhaps like Zola) with page building drag and drop tools like a Wix or a Squarespace? I'd love to move our site off of Wix - and have full control when needed and work offline before publishing pages - but inevitably you dive back into code or the guts of database queries once you leave these WYSIWYG tools. Between Wix and…

There are starting to appear lots of interesting tools in that space.

See e.g. https://www.sanity.io/ or https://www.contentful.com/

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#102

Post by threepio »

mdtusz wrote: post #100
threepio wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pollen, written in Racket, is arguably a "dsl for specifying ssgs" https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

Pollen seems so incredibly cool and powerful, but every time I have tried to play around with it, I get distracted by small quirks and areas that I wish were documented more clearly, or in a more organized format. My daydream is to make a _good_ technical documentation system with it that is usable by the everyman, but it's still just a bit too much of a stretch. Markdown + pandoc + LaTeX templates get close, but LaT…

This is a sample Pollen project, annotated by the author using Racket's literate-programming dialect.

https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen-tfl/

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#103

Post by Keats »

pdimitar wrote: post #87
southerntofu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do have suggestions and ideas but I feel like the author(s) are too busy and would appreciate code PRs much more. That is correct, and it would be sad and damaging to believe exhausted volunteer maintainers should satisfy each and every desire of yours. However, stating expectations and desires respectfully is really helpful, especially when it is done in a precise manner so someone with time and energy can try t…

> That is correct, and it would be sad and damaging to believe exhausted volunteer maintainers should satisfy each and every desire of yours. That's precisely why I am keeping silent. I worked on OSS myself and I don't want to come off as entitled. When I don't find the features that I would like I am mostly just shrugging and thinking to myself "either I'll research Zola's code base and make a good PR about it or I'…

> That's precisely why I am keeping silent.

(Author of Zola here)

I don't mind feature requests at all! The only thing I mind is people getting angry if I close a feature request as too niche or out of scope for Zola.

But for example, the big focus for the next version is better i18n support so feedback/opinions are very welcome: https://zola.discourse.group/t/rfc-internationalization-syst... but it is a big chunk of work so it will take some time.

For the revisions, I don't think it would work right now the way you want. I have thought about something similar before but couldn't figure out a satisfying way to do it (or even whether it was common enough for the work to be worth it).

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#104

Post by pembrook »

regus wrote: post #7

I 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…

> The other thing that tends to happen with SSGs is that it can be a lot more fun to play around with the tech than actually writing blog posts!

I wish I could remember the link, but there's a fantastic XKCD-style cartoon making fun of over-engineered static site generator blogging setups.

When you build a static site, basically there's a 99% chance your only blog post is going to be "How I rebuilt this blog in [insert] static site generator."

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#105

Post by Keats »

imjasonmiller wrote: post #24

I'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 somet…

> 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`?

Not right no. My issue with that is usually people that want a JS build system will want webpack, loaders and other JS dependencies to also work. You end up just executing webpack command from the SSG while the user could just run it themselves, without a layer.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#106

Post by mikepurvis »

Yoofie wrote: post #83
CJefferson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, all I want is a full proper programming language in my templating. Every templating language ends up being irritatingly limited, for me at least.

I use PHP for exactly this reason. I wrote my own single .exe binary (written in C++) that generates JSON files from markdown files + others. The JSON files are then turned into static files via PHP using whatever template I care to create. I think people their life harder when they go out of their way to avoid using PHP when really it is suited towards these types of problems.

I mean, it used to literally stand for Personal Home Page, so it sounds like you're using it for its original purpose.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#107

Post by Keats »

jacques_chester wrote: post #70
southerntofu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> support for its templating language is scarce Hello, i would say there's a few missing template features in Zola (especially hashmap literals/functions) but i don't find it scarce. Could you elaborate with your painpoints so they can be addressed for others as well? Zola is constantly evolving for the better, and the community forums are also a good place to exchange feedback/criticism

The Tera template language is not in wide use, so multi-language integrations with HTML were non-existent when I checked. That's tremendously inconvenient.

You can compile Tera to WASM if you want but that's the only solution if you want to use Tera templates outside of Rust.

As mentioned, it is _extremely_ similar to Jinja2 in Python, a good number of Jinja2 templates should be valid Tera and vice-versa.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#108

Post by pdimitar »

Keats wrote: post #103
pdimitar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is correct, and it would be sad and damaging to believe exhausted volunteer maintainers should satisfy each and every desire of yours. That's precisely why I am keeping silent. I worked on OSS myself and I don't want to come off as entitled. When I don't find the features that I would like I am mostly just shrugging and thinking to myself "either I'll research Zola's code base and make a good PR about it or I'…

> That's precisely why I am keeping silent. (Author of Zola here) I don't mind feature requests at all! The only thing I mind is people getting angry if I close a feature request as too niche or out of scope for Zola. But for example, the big focus for the next version is better i18n support so feedback/opinions are very welcome: https://zola.discourse.group/t/rfc-internationalization-syst... but it is a big chunk of…

> For the revisions, I don't think it would work right now the way you want. I have thought about something similar before but couldn't figure out a satisfying way to do it (or even whether it was common enough for the work to be worth it).

Well, if you like the feature, go for it! It's your project. :)

Seriously said though -- I think this has a lot of future in terms of f.ex. tech docs or Wiki-like articles where you would want to revise your opinion / take on a hot topic a year later. Such a feature is a glaring omission from the SSG engines IMO.

I'd love to help but sadly I am wrestling with severely deteriorated health and just being productive at work and functional enough for my family life is draining 90% of my daily energy budget. So I'd lie if I said that I could help right now. So I prefer not to lie.

(I'll definitely check out the thread for i18n, thanks for linking it!)

> The only thing I mind is people getting angry if I close a feature request as too niche or out of scope for Zola.

That won't ever happen with me. I don't get angry. I realize what it is to be an OSS maintainer and I am not entitled. I'll shoot my idea and if it doesn't get accepted I'll just shrug it off.

Thank you for the encouraging words! They mean a lot. Keep up the good work. Zola is so far my favorite SSG engine, it's just that I can't muster the energy to learn it well and maybe help extend it. Here's hoping for the future.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#109

Post by bccdee »

temp8964 wrote: post #94
regus wrote: post #7

I 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…

If you really want to focus on writing, why don't you just use WordPress? My feeling is that SSG is a toy to play with. I had a SSG blog before. After stop using it for half year and came back, I found I had to relearn the whole thing to be able to make it work again. Add any function is a PITA. Totally wasting of time.

You have to relearn it if you want to create a new theme for it. If you want to focus on writing, you just put new markdown files inside the post folder.

Not to mention that wordpress isn't static, which makes hosting more complicated & expensive.

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