Zola – Single binary static site generator

I enjoyed that you can build your own shortcode elements, so for my page I wrote a little script to scan for baking ingredient quantites and shows a widget to rescale the whole recipe. I can just type out regular recipes as markdown, without special tags other than wrapping in the shortcode.

Finding an existing template that is complete and easy to integrate took enough time that I just made my own outline and snazzed it up with a classless css framework (Sakura), though there are a couple blogs that dig down into which supports what features. Templating itself is fairly easy though the tutorial is a little convoluted.

Figuring out which variables were available for a specific context/page wasn't straightforward or seemingly consistent.

My biggest irritation though was that taxonomies have to be manually hardcoded at the top of each markup page, rather than naturally tagging within the document. And they need a specific template already existing to even build (it will error if everything doesn't match exactly)

I should note that Zola seems to be designed specifically for documentation, so trying to shoehorn it to other uses could be part of the friction I felt.