I run a few (well, one published, one in the works, a couple one-offs for student showcases) websites built with Zola. It's a great, little, simple piece of software.
What I like:
* Already supports the tooling I enjoy → SCSS out of the box, django/jade-like template engine (Terra, its sister project), markdown w/ TOML frontmatter
* Fast → build times are almost instant, dev server builds to memory and does live-reload
* Gets out of your way → it doesn't do more than it can, yet provides enough to work
* Builds a search index for client-side searching if needed
* Single Binary → I can pass the executable around with the repo and installation and environments are not an issue (ruby and python are painful for part-time developers it seems, at least with my non-developer academic peers).
I like that it provides a simple base to build on. I have one site that uses webpack to generate bundles for a couple JS files to allow for modern JS (babel) → all I have to use webpack for is JS, Zola handles the rest.
I migrated our Django theme for our previous site in an afternoon. I've found that those I work with often don't really understand how formatting in a CMS will apply in the published result, and often have to go back in and edit their pages for conformance → If I have to touch it anyway, I'd rather do it in markdown myself, something I enjoy using.
I have students/interns who have picked up markdown faster than any other markup or CMS. I've tried mezzanine [^meh] and wagtail [^excellent, but heavy for our brochure-ware] in python, wordpress is a pain [^either too flexible, or not flexible enough, research interns don't easily see how complex theme interactions occur] and some others like cockpit [^neat but flexible to a fault, yet too rigid for how free-form folks want to interact with it]. Markdown is translatable, and usable in other tools: it's a great common denominator with a very low bar for entry. Students continue to use it after first interacting with it on these projects after they've left.
What I'm missing:
* a way to build from an API endpoint instead of markdown, i.e.: point to an endpoint to get the section list, build children as pages. Then I could use content from a postgrest instance, or build it from a list of remote markdown files... (no, I haven't really thought this through very well)
YMMV.