Most of the static site generators don’t seem to generate “sites”. They instead generate “blogs”, with the concept of posts and pages very deep-rooted in the implementation.
I mention because I recently came across statik which is a static site generator written in Python which really lets you generate sites. You get to define the “models” which you’d like your site to have (if you define Post and Page models, you have something like pelican). Imagine Django, but compile-time (for the lack of a better analogy).
I might write a blog (heh) post on this later, but I would definitely suggest checking it out if you’re interested in static sites.
The handful or so that I have worked with all support defining models, Sculpin and Tapestry (i’m the author) call them content types, Jigsaw calls them collections. All three can be used to generate a static site, but for convenience (and likely because the usual users are minimalist bloggers) they come “blog aware” which simply means they have a blog collection configured out of the box.
I have used all three and a few others such as metalsmith (which also supports collections via plugin) for the purpose of generating small static sites with a handful of pages for clients as well as reasonable sized multi author blogs.
TL;DR, yes some SSGs come shipped with blog content types (models) pre-configured but that doesn’t make them only good for generating blogs.
This is interesting. I wish it didn’t use YAML though.
For the website, I ended up making a custom generator, and focus on blogs in most generators was one of the biggest reasons, even though not the only one.
Most of the static site generators don’t seem to generate “sites”. They instead generate “blogs”, with the concept of > posts and pages very deep-rooted in the implementation.
Bravo for saying this. I’ve faced the same problem, with static generators forcing me to give an author / date setting for each page. This might make sense for blogs, but doesn’t for the simple site I want to build.
And most of them force you to do things a certain way; it is so painful, which is no wonder people just go back to Wordpress.
Most of the static site generators don’t seem to generate “sites”. They instead generate “blogs”, with the concept of posts and pages very deep-rooted in the implementation.
I mention because I recently came across statik which is a static site generator written in Python which really lets you generate sites. You get to define the “models” which you’d like your site to have (if you define
PostandPagemodels, you have something like pelican). Imagine Django, but compile-time (for the lack of a better analogy).I might write a blog (heh) post on this later, but I would definitely suggest checking it out if you’re interested in static sites.
I maintain 3 websites, two with Jekyll (https://monix.io and https://typelevel.org/cats-effect/) and one with Middleman (https://alexn.org).
Both Jekyll and Middleman are perfectly capable for static websites. The blogging part is just a nice built-in feature.
I’ve been using Nikola (edit: for my landing page), because at the time it was the only one that had incremental builds. You have to follow their guide to reconfigure it for a non-blog setup: https://getnikola.com/creating-a-site-not-a-blog-with-nikola.html
VuePress has my interest now, especially once Netlify support is implemented.
Edit: I also have Sphinx instances: one as a public wiki and the other as a private notes repo.
The handful or so that I have worked with all support defining models, Sculpin and Tapestry (i’m the author) call them content types, Jigsaw calls them collections. All three can be used to generate a static site, but for convenience (and likely because the usual users are minimalist bloggers) they come “blog aware” which simply means they have a blog collection configured out of the box.
I have used all three and a few others such as metalsmith (which also supports collections via plugin) for the purpose of generating small static sites with a handful of pages for clients as well as reasonable sized multi author blogs.
TL;DR, yes some SSGs come shipped with blog content types (models) pre-configured but that doesn’t make them only good for generating blogs.
This is interesting. I wish it didn’t use YAML though.
For the website, I ended up making a custom generator, and focus on blogs in most generators was one of the biggest reasons, even though not the only one.
Bravo for saying this. I’ve faced the same problem, with static generators forcing me to give an author / date setting for each page. This might make sense for blogs, but doesn’t for the simple site I want to build.
And most of them force you to do things a certain way; it is so painful, which is no wonder people just go back to Wordpress.
Amy Hoy wrote a great article on this : https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/