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| 33 Recommended Products | Recommendations | Language | Template Engine | Markup Languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 Pelican· · · | 39 | 0 | Python | Jinja2 | reStructuredText, Markdown, AsciiDoc |
| #2 Jekyll· · · | 75 | 9 | Ruby | Liquid | HTML, Markdown |
| #3 Octopress· · · | 37 | 2 | Ruby | – | – |
| #4 Middleman· · · | 26 | 0 | Ruby | – | – |
| #5 DocPad· · · | 24 | 0 | CoffeeScript | – | – |
| #6 Wintersmith· · · | 19 | 0 | JavaScript | – | – |
Pro Open source
All code is available on GitHub.
Pro Multilingual
Easily handles multiple languages, like EN, FR, etc.
Pro GitHub Pages offers free hosting with a github.io subdomain
You can host your site with great stability and Jekyll support out of the box for free by using GitHub pages.
Pro Has a built in server
You can spin up a static server at localhost:4000 by running jekyll serve
Con Little Windows support
Windows is not an officially supported platform and setting it up on Windows requires a lot more tinkering than Linux or OSX.
Pro Very easy to use
Octopress is designed to remove all the time-consuming and frustrating tasks you usually have to deal with when using Jekyll. You don't have to write your own HTML templates or do any configuration to get started. The default template also takes care of any basic CSS/JS you need to write to get
Pro Based on Jekyll
As Octopress is simply a framework on top of Jekyll, it benefits from being based on one of the most popular site generators available. The primary benefit is that it is backed by git and is built in such a way that the site can be easily re-generated if the content changes.
Con Inefficient
Adding a new post, for example, causes the entire blog to be regenerated.
Pro Built in minification, compression, and cache busting
Minification and compression are as easy as setting a few configuration options, and unique asset hashes are available to allow you to invalidate the cache of files that change regularly.
Pro Support for a variety of templating languages and preprocessors
Middleman supports lots of compiled languages, such as Less, Markdown, Textile, CoffeeScript, Stylus and more.
Con A little more complicated than other static site generators
Middleman is a big piece of software, it's not simply a static blog generator. Because of all the functionality and flexibility it offers it can be a little more complex than other static site generators and a little harder to learn all of its bells and whistles.
Pro Has graphical admin interfaces for managing your blog
There are multiple custom interfaces, including miniCMS available to DocPad which provide WYSIWYG editing and article management.
Pro Built on Node
DocPad is published as an NPM module which makes it easy to integrate with an existing Node.js deployment.
Con Support for Handlebars templates is not mature - integration is awkward
Handlebars' philosophy of "no logic in templates" makes some things difficult: DocPad built-in template helpers aren't available by default - they have to be manually added/exposed DocPad's example template code often includes logic, which makes it impossible to use w...
Con More up-front investment to learn/use well
DocPad provides a LOT of extensibility and dynamic capability, which means there's more up-front investment to learn DocPad well -- and deviating from the defaults while maintaining project robustness may be difficult.
Pro Markdown support
Wintersmith has an extensive Markdown support. Default, it is rendered by Marked. However there are plugins available for others (such as Markdown-it).
Pro Templates
Templating engine comes with Jade plugin and many third-party plugins.
Con Thin and disorganized documentation
The documentation for Wintersmith is lacking examples and clear explanations. It's also quite disorganized, making it difficult to find what you're looking for.
Pro Open-source and free
Code can be viewed on GitHub.
Pro No dependencies
All other SSGs expect you to have a full toolchain setup for their language. Hugo is written in Go and distributed as an executable for unix, linux, windows and mac. Just download and run.
Con Lacking Windows Setup
Lacking Windows Setup
Pro Flexibly built
Nanoc is a good choice if you need to support a site with a more complex structure than a simple blog. Nanoc is more agnostic to the types of pages you have, and allows you to do finer tuned refinements like customizing the URL structure.
Pro Extensibile
Nanoc has a modular architecture which makes it easier to incorporate plugins and functionality from other projects as well as extend functionality.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
Pro Generating a blog is pretty fast
Generating a new blog with Hexo is generally really fast. Hexo truly lives up to it's name as a simple and fast static website generator.
Con Relatively large community but the majority is non-english speakers
Hexo has a relatively large following and community, especially in China. While this is certainly a positive, many developers who do not know chinese would be unable to follow all the guides and tutorials out there written by their chineses counterparts.
Pro Pandoc Markdown
Simple format with LaTeX and syntax highlighting support.
Pro Haskell
Written in Haskell
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Pro Markdown and LaTeX support
Markdown and LaTeX can be used at the same time.
Pro Takes care of conflicts between Markdown and LaTeX
By writing LaTeX formulas as $...$ and $$...$$ all conflicts will be avoided.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
Pro MIT Open Source
A very flexible license to do whatever you want. Code available on GitHub.
Pro Friendly CMS that clients can use
Webhook has a CMS admin page that can be access on the live site. This lets your clients login and edit the site like a traditional CMS system.
Con Requires registration
Even simple command line tools require registration.
Con Documentation can be hard to navigate
Especially for someone new to Assemble, it can be difficult to find what you're looking for in the documentation.
Pro Flexible beyond a static site generator
Because metalsmith is at its core focused on transforming directories of files, it can be used for more than just static site generation, and could be used as a build tool, a documentation generator, or any use that requires file transformations.
Pro Designed around plugins
Everything in metalsmith is a plugin, and it is designed to make it easy to write new ones.
Con Not client enabled API chaining
According to the spec on API chaining, the API request/response need to associate an API object to an corresponding controller/action/uri to be able to validate and handle the request/response and the datasets. Without that, the consuming client service cannot properly validate or relate the data...
Con Small community
The Metalsmith community is still fairly small compared to the more popular options. This results in a lack of learning resources and difficulty finding support from experienced users. However, a slack group has recently been started.
Pro You can use it for free
It's free to use because it's an open-source software under the MIT license.
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Pro Easy creation of templates and content
Supports Twig for templating with Parsedown for fast Markdown and Markdown Extra support.
Pro Easy to use admin panel
Well designed, easily usable and modern admin panel is a boost as it lets Clients edit the content easily.
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Pro Live reload
Every change you make can be almost immediately seen in a browser.
Con A bit raw
You'll maybe have to tweak some JSX if you want something that's not covered by available themes.
Pro Active development
Roots has heavy corporate sponsorship and is worked on very actively as a full time job. That means you can rely on it.
Pro Quick deploys
You can deploy to heroku, github pages, s3, etc. with a single command.
Con No i18n (Internationalization)
There is no i18n support out of the box. And there is only one extension that does i18n compilation with a limited feature set.
Pro Extensible via Python
See tutorial here.
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Pro Manages complex dependency graphs
You don't need to recompile the entire website at once - Make uses file modification times and a graph of dependencies to determine exactly what should be updated whenever a file is changed.
Pro Supports all languages
Literally all of them. Make lets you call your compilers, preprocessors, and minifiers with standard process execution through whatever shell you want. You're not limited to any particular language or plugin format.
Con Quoting / Escaping issues
While the Make language is thoroughly documented, quoting and escaping, especially with variables, can be unintuitive compared to other programming languages.
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