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Comment by ohitsdom | Hacker News Reader

OT: I like Jekyll for blogs, but I'm looking for something simpler to better fit a simple use case.

I want to generate static HTML files, the simplest example being a 5 page website that uses the same header and footer template across all pages. I want static files for simple scaling, not PHP or JS templating. Ideally this tool would be node based for simple automation with gulp. Anything out there that fits the bill? Handelbars.js with precompiler looks like a good fit, but I'm curious what others use in this scenario.

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You might want to try Hexo (https://hexo.io/) or Wintersmith (http://wintersmith.io/). I use Hexo for my personal website and have really enjoyed it.

I tried Jekyll before, but between Ruby, some bugs and template choice overload I dropped it. Moved to Hexo a few months ago and built a couple projects with it. It's worked great for writing but also building a reviews website.

Nunjucks is an excellent JS template engine for this kind of work, since it permits template inheritance. It's quite similar to Jinja in Python, if you're familiar with it.

Other options would be Middleman or Metalsmith. I've used both of them successfully for relatively complex static sites. But I wouldn't call them simpler than Jekyll.

I've used Middleman in the past, but I actually just switched to Jekyll for my personal single page website.

I found Jekyll to work very well out of box. All of my content is in a markdown file, with styling broken out to layout HTML and CSS.

IMO, I find the community around Jekyll, along with the understandability of Ruby to outweigh using a simpler solution.

Fair enough. My only experience with Ruby was to get Jekyll running so it wasn't as familiar to me, but the community and support is a pretty strong point.

Metalsmith? http://www.metalsmith.io/

It takes a bit of configuring, but seems like it would be exactly what you want.

I looked at it before but I'm not sure why I moved on, it does seem to fit really well. Thanks!

I use Hugo for my blog, but I'm not familiar with Jekyll so can't comment on simplicity.

Use any templating library that gives "template inheritance" as feature. I use Nunjucks (from Mozilla)

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