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Soupault: A static website management tool

soupault.app

21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#21

Honestly, I could not get to a point of clarity on What does this exactly do. I went through the website's landing page and looks pretty rock solid. But this seems to be trying to do too many things in a pretty complex way for a small and simple output. I want to like this, and I think this can help me with some of my mundane chores and focus on the content but I just cannot quite grasp it. Can someone, please, do a…

I'm gunna be honest: I'm in this court ("why?" "what problem does this solve?") with, well, the whole SSG thing.

I get why people want to write their content in Markdown (well, specifically, I get why tech people want to write their content in Markdown, but not normal humans who almost always want a WYSIWYG) - but what I just can't get my head around is the vast complexity that almost all these tools seem to bring to the table.

I've looked at it for so long now I think I've basically got a terrible mental block - for most scenarios, I just don't get it. I don't see what the problem is that is being solved. Booting up a bunch of HTML files, or a simple WordPress site, or a manually built PHP thing that pulls Markdown files and uses a couple of includes to solve the "how do we replicate menus?" question - this makes sense to me.

I'm not talking about this tool (like you I have no idea what it actually does) but the whole Hugo/Gatsby/Jekyll/etc thing. Having (what looks like!) a steep learning curve, then a whole bunch of build steps, lots of dependencies, frameworks, templates etc etc - in order to get what is being sold here as the end game (a fast, dependency free, "just html", no risk website) just feels like ...madness.

I badly need someone to explain to me why all these tools are doing something better. That's a serious request, btw, would love for someone to enlighten me!

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#23
post #8

This may sound counter intuitive, but I am befuddled with all these static site generators always CLI. Yet, I delight in static sites . Why is are all static site generators (that I am aware of) are CLI? What prevent simplistic drag and drop GUI/WYSIWYG that generates those clean static files? All the static generators I have tested are way over-complicated for the "general public", yet I think static sites are proba…

> Why is are all static site generators (that I am aware of) are CLI? What prevent simplistic drag and drop GUI/WYSIWYG that generates those clean static files? Check: - Tina CMS: https://tina.io/ - Primo CMS: https://primocms.org/ More generally, try looking for `git-based cms` or `CMS+SSG`, you'll find a diverse set of solutions. Anyway, you had it in reverse. Static generation is the easy part, while what you're l…

I agree with you. There’s even an ecosystem of plugins for WordPress that will generate static assets from your site.

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#24
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try https://getpublii.com

I've set this up for my parents, they have a small bed and breakfast in the countryside, and they love it. It's much more responsive then their past WordPress install when editing, because their desktop is faster than a cheap PHP hosting. Some things are needlessly complicated in publii though, I'd like to make a more minimal version one day

Ditto, I've used this for my mother's website. She probably could use something even simpler but mostly I'm pretty happy with it.

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#25
I think there is a parallel between an increasingly hacky/complex Jekyll/Hugo setup and a hacky/complex low-code system. These systems are good for prototyping and getting going, but there may be a certain point where it ends up being easier and more manageable to do the thing in code.

It can also be a nice side project to find a markdown/rst/etc. parser and make a site generator.

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#26

I think there is a parallel between an increasingly hacky/complex Jekyll/Hugo setup and a hacky/complex low-code system. These systems are good for prototyping and getting going, but there may be a certain point where it ends up being easier and more manageable to do the thing in code. It can also be a nice side project to find a markdown/rst/etc. parser and make a site generator.

[deleted]

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#27
post #21

Honestly, I could not get to a point of clarity on What does this exactly do. I went through the website's landing page and looks pretty rock solid. But this seems to be trying to do too many things in a pretty complex way for a small and simple output. I want to like this, and I think this can help me with some of my mundane chores and focus on the content but I just cannot quite grasp it. Can someone, please, do a…

I'm gunna be honest: I'm in this court ("why?" "what problem does this solve?") with, well, the whole SSG thing. I get why people want to write their content in Markdown (well, specifically, I get why tech people want to write their content in Markdown, but not normal humans who almost always want a WYSIWYG) - but what I just can't get my head around is the vast complexity that almost all these tools seem to bring to…

The tools (mostly) all start out simple, as you described. Then they start to get traction and users. More users equals more diverse use cases and feature requests. Each individual request makes sense, for that group of users, and is implemented. Slowly the software grows in complexity, until you have Hugo etc... Then people say it's too complex and start over - and it all happens again.

This applies to all software - and most other things that humans make that have large numbers of users, like governments, countries, or other systems.

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#28

This may sound counter intuitive, but I am befuddled with all these static site generators always CLI. Yet, I delight in static sites . Why is are all static site generators (that I am aware of) are CLI? What prevent simplistic drag and drop GUI/WYSIWYG that generates those clean static files? All the static generators I have tested are way over-complicated for the "general public", yet I think static sites are proba…

There is Rapid Weaver for the Mac!

https://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/

Im also a huge fan of Cloud Cannon. Which puts a CMS of sorts on top of static site generators.

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#29

This may sound counter intuitive, but I am befuddled with all these static site generators always CLI. Yet, I delight in static sites . Why is are all static site generators (that I am aware of) are CLI? What prevent simplistic drag and drop GUI/WYSIWYG that generates those clean static files? All the static generators I have tested are way over-complicated for the "general public", yet I think static sites are proba…

Yellow is nice: https://github.com/datenstrom/yellow

Re: Soupault: A static website management tool

#30

This may sound counter intuitive, but I am befuddled with all these static site generators always CLI. Yet, I delight in static sites . Why is are all static site generators (that I am aware of) are CLI? What prevent simplistic drag and drop GUI/WYSIWYG that generates those clean static files? All the static generators I have tested are way over-complicated for the "general public", yet I think static sites are proba…

also php driven https://getgrav.org has a webui admin panel which can replace it's CLI admin tool chain.
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