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Comment by adimitrov | Hacker News Reader

Same story here. I was looking for a static site gen that was a bit more comfortable than my previous shell scripts around pandoc approach.

I settled on Hugo because it ticked all the boxes and even had org mode support.

The next three nights were horrible. I'm a professional web dev, full stack, I've used dozens of langs, frameworks, probably hundreds of tools. It took me three nights to set up a basic home page for an academic CV and some publication lists. Nothing more. And even then the whole thing was wonky and super unreliable for inscrutable reasons. Big red flag.

I was angry and frustrated, and I started doubting myself. So I pulled the plug. Tried Zola, I was done in 1.5hrs. Start to finish, just done. Zola is great.

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Similar story for me (I also do full stack web dev professionally aswell), but with hugo->Jekyll.

Hours and days struggling with getting Hugo to do what I wanted until I gave up and had a Jekyll site up and running exactly how I wanted it within a few hours.

Who cares about saving 5 seconds site generation time when you lose days pulling your hair out just trying to get the damn thing to do what you want?

I've never felt that site generation time has been a problem for me, although I've only worked on things with 10s-100s of pages, not thousands... But then part of me wonders who it is out there who is doing site-wide updates to x,000 page sites who needs it to happen in 2 seconds? What kind of workflow on a site of that scale can't wait 30 seconds?

My home page (a few hundred pages, lots of images) took over one minute to build with Jekyll and around a second with Hugo. Waiting for a minute for every tiny change I make trying to figure out things makes it completely unusable.

That said, Hugo is the only piece of software I remember that makes me feel stupid.

It must be a awesome if you use it frequently, but I only make changes to my sites maybe once per year. I often struggle for hours to make simple changes or to figure out why it's not working. Two examples:

https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/raw-html-getting-omitted-in-0-... https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/comprehensive-hugo-tutorial-fo...

Sharing the feeling of others in this thread and happy to discover Zola! :)

I had the exact experience, but I'm not a web developer. Hugo was one of the more frustrating things I ever tried, I converted to Zola in about 2h and it was simple and it simply works.

You know what I did? I just wrote my own site generator in Go in under 200 LOC. I spent 2 hours writing it. It's very basic and does not do many things that these frameworks offer. I currently can create blog posts and pages from markdown. The nice thing about this is that I can just extend my go code as needed without having to (re)learn these frameworks; which is my biggest issue with any frameworks in general.

See https://vilkeliskis.com/static/build.go

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