awesome-static-generators - A curated list of static web site generators | Hacker News Reader

awesome-static-generators - A curated list of static web site generators

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I feel like a lot of these awesome curated lists would provide more value if the curator added some notes. "You probably want A unless you need to do X, in which case you should choose B or C. D isn't production-ready yet but is making rapid progress so keep an eye on it." As it is, most of these lists aren't much more useful than a web search would be.

Having tried a few, the thing I settled on is Wordpress.

Why? It is not going anywhere, it has lots of themes and plugins, you rarely have to "code", in the sense of writing programming code, or figuring out the precise location to drop a file based on the behaviour of the generator. Or battle with TOML.

Finally there are plugins that will pump out a static site from Wordpress if you want the performance/security of that. Or you can use a caching plugin if you need the performance but are happy with Wordpress security.

There are sites I set up for other people I may not touch for years. If it is on Wordpress, and they ask me to do an update to the text, I know I can do it without much fuss.

WordPress is fantastic, but sometime it's complex plugins/themes make headaches.

For example - if you make site for some small client like a "mobile tire services" or "locksmith in XYZ" their site won't be changed for months or even years.

And here is a Catch 22 - because content won't be changed, they (customers) refuse to pay for maintenance. When something happens (broken plugin update, outdated theme, hacking, etc) it's too late and site need to be fixed that may take few hours (or even days).

That's why for such customers - static site it's perfect. I will add also Bootstrap Studio to that list: https://bootstrapstudio.io

In that case you can export WP to static site. I think some of the plugins can talk directly to mainstream hosts, like S3, Github pages etc. so there is no fiddly downloading and uploading to do.

Yup - already do that. You also don't need plugin that can talk because they even don't have contact form - only way to connect them is via phone.

This makes a lot of sense, but blogging without a good deal of static site generator yak shaving sounds awfully close to real work ;) that’s a no go for me.

IMO anything that uses a database is overkill for a static site, even if it's user-friendly.

My go to list is https://jamstack.org/generators/.

I worked my way through trying about 7 of that list before realizing that my desires were way too specific. I ended up writing a SSG myself (with Deno + NanoJSX to do JSX compiling).

This is a great list! Hadn’t heard of cms.js before, looks interesting.

I wonder what the dividing line between ‘blog’ and ‘framework’ was? I was surprised to see 11ty and Jekyll under blog, instead of down with Gatsby and Hugo under Framework.

Yeah wondering the same. Would be good to understand some of the criteria for choices and some top 3 type recommendations for each choice.

Author of the list here. At the time i created this list the separation between blog and framework was how much code vs. content you had to write to build the website. Jekyll for instance can be built with just a few markdown files while Gatsby required you to write JSX code. This probably doesn’t make sense in this day and age of static site generation and I should rethink the sections.

For my site using Gatsby https://www.bobbydreamer.com

I’m glad to see hexo on here. It’s an underdog, but very capable, simple and fast.

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