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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

One static site generator that I recently discovered and plan to make frequent use of next year is Middleman (Ruby), which is like Jekyll, except less focused on blogging and more app-like conveniences...for example, being able to use erb rather than going through Liquid:

http://middlemanapp.com/

Overall, I'd like to see static-site generators become more widespread as an option. I've seen a few great sites/products recently in which the developer felt they needed to deploy a Wordpress instance even though their site was little more than a landing page and a few about pages. The less friction there is to getting content up, the easier it is to be motivated to create content.

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I'm a big fan of Middleman too. Means I can use Haml, Sass, CoffeeScript etc. along with various Ruby view helpers to keep the templates tidy, then build the whole thing as part of the deployment process. Blog posts are in Markdown, which is even better, and the whole thing has live reloading. Very slick development process.

I wonder if it would be possible to build a CMS-alike on top of Middleman - something with a web interface to manage the content, edit templates and scripts etc., but using Middleman to generate a static site when changes are pushed. I guess it's another thing to add to the list…

This is not inherently related to Middleman, but I'm hugely grateful to it because through Middleman, I stumbled on to Slim, which is a nicer-looking Haml alternative that even allows Markdown. I've started using it in my Rails app and that alone was a game-changing improvement.

The way that Middleman can be so easily extended with plugins and gems the way that a Sinatra app can, while still maintaining the simplicity of a static app...It's really a breakthrough for me.

I think what's missing for static site generators to gain traction is a consumer-friendly admin interface. Kirby comes to mind here: http://getkirby.com/

Agreed...but what I think improvement has to come from both sides, not just in the software, but in the content creators.

Is it so hard for people to learn Markdown? Not just geeks, but anyone? How hard is it compared to learning the myriad of word processing tools that you're expected to know by high school? How much time does it take to learn Markdown compared to the minutes per day that you spend trying to debug the hidden markup of Rich Text/WYSIWYG editors (e.g., why is this text have the same font-weight as the headings now)?

Once the average person learns how to disassociate content from presentation and how markup is the key thing, then static site generators, and the real power of simplicity, become obvious.

I think to your average person markdown looks like a step down from WYSiWYG, especially when there's a massively successful, user friendly alternative called Wordpress.

I think that's a battle already lost.

> I think to your average person markdown looks like a step down from WYSiWYG

I agree. When I worked for a company that mostly sold custom websites to smallish companies, our sales guy would show his marks the TinyMCE interface and they loved it. I reckon we sold a lot of websites to people who believed we were giving them the ability to manage their own content easily.

Even better, we were able to generate more revenue when those people invariably messed up their content and needed us to fix it. So really it's win-win.

And all that lovely pasted MS word code ;) It's easy to end up with formatting nightmares. The roll-back button is a must.

I hate those editors with a passion, and though I like tools like Markdown (and Git), they are still problematic for people to use.

In many ways I don't see why the editor can't be right there as a first class citizen in the browser like it used to be. Linking and embedding needs to be simple.

Average users don't really want to get to grips with html or some other markup language. But it would be great if at least they could grok linking.

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