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Comment by forlorn | Hacker News Reader

Could you suggest a more general purpose static site generator? 99% of them target blogs but most of times you need a bit more. Hugo looks like the most advanced of them but its documentation leaves much to be desired and doesn't include real-life examples of different projects.

I'd love to have a tool to generate a catalogue, a simple journal, etc.

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Have you had a look at Lektor (https://www.getlektor.com). It's from the creator of Flask, and is a static CMS implemented in Python. It goes beyond just simple blogging, and allows you to define models for any entity you want to store. It's extremely flexible. It also has a pretty decent UI for writing things in, and is Dropbox-friendly for non-tech users, too.

The landing page explains the benefits quite well. Also, it has good examples of Lektor being used for a catalogue: https://www.getlektor.com/showcase/architekten-ronacher/ (direct link to the interactive version http://www.architekten-ronacher.at/projects/)

If you want lots of customization and are friendly with Python I would suggest rolling your own project with Flask and Flask-Freeze. You get all the benefits of complete customization from URLs to templated pages and scripts. Really anything. While this isn't a canned solution, it is a really robust solution.

Just to continue on...

With this setup you can have anything (ANYTHING!) powering the data side. From CSVs to any SQL server local or remote, directories of markdown files, directories of ZIP archives, random (or deterministic) numbers or generable sequences.

Flask gives you so much freedom with the backend implementation you can draw from anywhere. You just need to define the URL patterns and supply the functions that respond with HTML. Flask-Freeze then crawls your site (or a list of pages you specify) and renders the HTML with whatever function you supplied. Couldn't be easier to understand and it is unbelievably flexible.

Metal. http://www.metalsmith.io/

For sites which are closer to books, gitbook is an option as well. https://www.gitbook.com/

You may be better served by Lektor: https://www.getlektor.com/

Middleman is still my favorite static site generator and it has exactly that in mind: General purpose website that may or may not feature a blog. If you're already familiar with ruby it's an obvious choice. If not, I'm sure there are countless alternatives.

Do you have an example of catalogue/journal that you would want to do? Gutenberg can do blogs but I originally built it for any kind of content: landing page, landing page + knowledge base, landing page + blog etc so it should work in theory.

However, if your data is coming from an API/database something like Gatsby (https://www.gatsbyjs.org) would be better.

Have you looked at the Hugo themes and the tags on the right side?

Here are themes tagged Portfolio: https://themes.gohugo.io/tags/portfolio/

I actually find many themes that are non-blog based in there.

A theme isn't exactly what's asked... Themes are just... A lot of work put into making an unwieldy system meant for blogging look like something else.

From what I have seen, Hugo themes are a combination of visual makeover plus some even requiring a certain structure of site content. Here's an example theme DocDock[1] that is not just a blog made to look like something else.

Again, YMMW.

[1]: https://themes.gohugo.io/theme/docdock/content-organisation/

Look into Wyam (https://wyam.io/). It has a concept of "recipes" which are in essence a custom static site generators themselves but which feed into the core Wyam engine.

I know I'm late to the party here, but I love Statik (https://github.com/thanethomson/statik) for this.

Vote for Middleman.

I'm working one on, it's more of a static app builder though:

github.com/tmzt/isymtope

Working on a major push/update.

Genuine question: what does the term "static app" refer to? As I understood it, "webapp" explicitly refers to a site is not static.

Very good question, and one I've been trying to answer in a concise way.

Essentially it's "static" in the sense that it could be used to generate a fully rendered page that is also an interactive (javascript) application.

It can also process actions on the server and generate a new HTML page in response to that that will be hydrated in the client.

It's an attempt to give you the best-of-both-worlds with a SPA, but one that arrives fully-rendered so there are no delays loading content. It's an SSR approach but without using a javascript engine or framework on the server, the server-side component is completely developed in Rust.

As far as "static app", I would say it's closer to something like Disqus being used on a static doc site or Firebase used for storage when github pages are used to host a site. It means it doesn't rely on server-side rendering to function as a PHP or ASP.net site does, but it can use it if available.

Grow https://grow.io/

> a catalog, a simple journal, etc.

Would you please describe the data model you have in mind a bit more?

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