Ask HN: What is your favorite system for static website generation?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6803493

by jaytaylor • 13 years ago

25 17 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Do you use a static website generator other than Jekyll or Hyde? And if you use Hyde, what are your thoughts on new version (v0.8.8 https://github.com/hyde/hyde) compared to "classic" (v0.5.3 https://github.com/lakshmivyas/hyde)?

pvorb2• 13 years ago

Hakyll (http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/) ist pretty sweet if you know Haskell.

pvorb2• 13 years ago

PS: It uses Pandoc, which is big plus for me and might be for you too.

binaryautomata• 13 years ago

I like Cactus (https://github.com/koenbok/Cactus) and PieCrust (http://bolt80.com/piecrust/). They are both super flexible and have met my static generator needs nicely.

Haven't tried Hyde or Jekyll.

mitchtbaum• 13 years ago

Pelican (https://github.com/getpelican/pelican) is a great static site generator. I really like the power of content metadata. The plugins are good, and development is ongoing. To top it off, the users on IRC are friendly and helpful. I'm sold.

draegtun• 13 years ago

It's an oldie but I still use Template Toolkit for building most of my static websites - http://www.template-toolkit.org/

gatesphere• 13 years ago

Flask with FrozenFlask provides a nice framework to roll your own. Which is what I've done for every site I ship.

eswat• 13 years ago

Started getting into Assemble (http://assemble.io/) since I’ve been digging deeper in Yeoman + Grunt + Bower lately.

kape• 13 years ago

Middleman (http://middlemanapp.com/), easy to setup and deploy and uses Ruby.

pjungwir• 13 years ago

I use Nanoc for http://illuminatedcomputing.com/. I tried Jekyll first, but I didn't like using Liquid. Instead I write the templates in Haml and the content in Markdown.

michaelmior• 13 years ago

+1 for Nanoc. I tried several before settling on this and I'm quite happy. It's simple, but fairly powerful and easy to extend.

amitu• 13 years ago

I love djangothis, https://github.com/amitu/djangothis. http://amitu.com/2013/09/djangothis-for-blogging/.

I am biased because I built it, but if you like jekyll, but prefer django/python, you should give djangothis a try.

Riley• 13 years ago

My favorite is Simplpost: http://simplpost.com/blog/what-is-this-thing/

It's not a command line tool, but it makes nice responsive static sites. And it's easy enough for my girlfriend to use. That's why I built it.

thibaultCha• 13 years ago

I wanted to build my own for my website, so here it is, a command line tool released as an npm package: http://thibaultcha.github.io/Equiprose/

- It's using Jade and Stylus for templating.

- It's a commande line interface.

- Natively supports emojis, a la GitHub.

- YAML for configuration and Markdown for redaction.

- You can create as many websites as you want, they can all be configured differently and be served on test servers or build to their output directory.

kayman• 13 years ago

emacs org mode converted to html using org-publish. http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-publish-html-tutor...

ElongatedTowel• 13 years ago

I'm using one I wrote myself. I'm not sure if it makes sense to ever release it, seeing that there are already over 9000 more mature generators out there, but I'm trying to solve some problems I've had with others, which mostly are:

* A simple interface (Unlike e.g. Pelican, which uses Makefiles to prettify it's command line interface)

* A sane template engine (Basically ruling out anything Ruby. Jekyll's Liquid engine for example only provides includes, no template inheritance)

* No unnecessary large dependencies like requiring Django

* Freedom of choice (I want to use YAML and Markdown)

* Tightly coupled asset pipeline

* Enough building blocks to quickly solve most usecases

* Should easily be usable on Windows (No makefiles please, no compiler necessary to install)

* Pluggable theming and extension support

Most newer generators solve most of these problems. For some reason most of them are written in Ruby though, which to my surprise has very popular template engines which don't even provide template inheritance.

jeddi• 13 years ago

I use Mynt [ https://github.com/Anomareh/mynt ] - it's got a small community of users, but the primary author is active and responsive. It uses python and sass.

mark_l_watson• 13 years ago

I use Jekyll for http://markwatson.com/blog and I generally like it. I used blogger (mapped to a subdomain) for years and liked it but decided I wanted more control over my own "property". Before using Jekyll I tried a cheap Wordpress host for a few months. Wordpress is OK, but had a lot of ceremony for what I need, and static web page generation was a good fit. I also like the Jekyll tools for producing nicely formatted program listings for a variety of languages.

Ask HN: What is your favorite system for static website generation?

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