Nikola vs Metalsmith
When comparing Nikola vs Metalsmith, the Slant community recommends Nikola for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Nikola is ranked 10th while Metalsmith is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Nikola is:
Nikola posts may be written in a variety of formats. You can write posts in HTML, with all the expressive power of HTML and CSS, and still have the benefits of a site-wide theme and navigation structure.
Specs
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Pros
Pro HTML input
Nikola posts may be written in a variety of formats. You can write posts in HTML, with all the expressive power of HTML and CSS, and still have the benefits of a site-wide theme and navigation structure.
Pro Host on any web server
Nikloa sites are static files, and thus may be hosted on any web server that allows you to upload your own files. This lets you use simple and inexpensive hosting providers and still have a reliable site.
Pro Write in reStructuredText and Markdown
You have better choices for markup than raw HTML.
Pro Free open-source software (MIT license)
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.
Pro Chaining API
Metalsmith uses a chaining API that's consistent and simple to use:
Metalsmith(__dirname)
.use(markdown)
.use(templates('handlebars'))
.build();
Cons
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.
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 datasets from one to the other. Links have no relational value and the api object creates the relationship between the datasets while maintaining an api/dataset relationship with the corresponding controller/action/uri
As such, the current methodology supported would not be able to be called by the client not supported by the client in a RESTFUL manner