Alternate static site generators to Jekyll

GoLang Based 🔗︎

• Hugo - By far the best I’ve found out of all possibilities. Although I don’t know Go, with Hugo, I only need to know a few basics and I don’t need to install it.

  • ✅ Can use YAML configuration and Front Matter like Jekyll does. (TOML also supported)
  • ✅ Simple initial set-up. A single executable is everything required. Although Hugo is based on GoLang, it is packaged into a single executable for those who don’t want or need to mess with Go itself.
  • ✅ Being able to easily run the build locally means full access to any error messages.
  • ✅ Executable has a development server built in.
  • ✅ Supported by a number of free, cloud-based deployment and CMS tools such as Netlify and Forestry.IO.
  • ✅ Easily handles both page- and post-based sites and combinations of both.
  • ✅ Active and helpful online community, regular updates.
  • ✅ Lots of automation hooks available such as multiple output types for generating alternative forms of data.
  • ✅ Simple integration of data-driven outputs.
  • ✅ Relatively simple to generate new themes. I built a new theme from scratch in less than a week of casual, out-of-hours writing.
  • ❌ Logic and flow can be complex to comprehend and reason about. Usually takes several readings of the documentation to work out how to do things if it isn’t immediately obvious.
  • ❌ Use of GoLang as the underlying code language results in distinctly non-standard structures for templates.
  • ❌ Some of the built-in templates and shortcodes are hard to understand without digging through the Hugo source code as they are poorly documented.
  • ❌ The speed of change of Hugo can result in documentation lagging behind the actual code. (Generally, the key contributors do a good job of keeping up though).

Node.JS Based 🔗︎

All of this list use Node.JS to underpin the generation of static pages.

• Hexo - seemed promising at first sight. But a quick dig through the impressive list of addins reveals many of them to be out of date or not working properly.

  • ✅ Uses YAML configuration and Front Matter like Jekyll does.
  • ✅ Large list of plugins, all published on NPM.
  • ✅ Simple initial set-up.
  • ❌ Many plugins out-of-date or not fully working.
  • ❌ Many plugins very poorly documented or documented in Chinese.
  • ❌ Does not handle page-based sites well. Focussed on blogging (posts).
  • ❌ Needs plugins to provide more rounded capabilities.

• Gatsby - Complex but comprehensive

  • ✅ Large list of plugins published on NPM & GitHub.
  • ✅ Large number of contributors.
  • ✅ Powerful.
  • ❌ Complex to configure, lots of moving parts.
  • ❌ An awful lot of “magic” happens! While the file system is reasonably well arranged it is very hard to reason about the logic.