Hi,

I’m interested in setting up a small static-site-generator site. Looked at 11ty recently and feel pretty uncomfortable with the amount of javascript and “funny language” churn just to make some html happen.

Do you know of any alternative that’s simpler / easier / less complicated dependencies? Or do you have an approach to 11ty that you think I should try?

Thanks in advance for any input, it’s appreciated!

  • pseudonym@monyet.ccEnglish
    34·
    2 months ago

    I use Hugo and I’ve been pretty happy with it. It has a lot of layout templates you can use out of the box so you don’t need to learn a new templating language unless you want to do customizations. I write blogs in markdown and it’s automatically rendered and published.

    • bahbah23@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      2 months ago

      But as soon as you do want to customize it, you’re stuck learning one of the most esoteric languages that wasn’t meant as a joke.

      • ctag@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        Thanks for the heads up. That feels like the same roadblock I got with 11ty. It ran OK on markdown, but one you dig into how wide the customizations go I couldn’t keep up.

    • DichotoDeezNutz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      I used Hugo for my portfolio site, and it’s great if you like an existing theme, but making one from scratch is a challenge. The documentation is unclear and there’s a chicken and egg problem about how to learn Hugo.

      The go templating is OK, I prefer other syntax but it works.

    • rutrum@lm.paradisus.dayEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      I used Zola for a while, but at the end of the day there wasnt enough themes available that fit what I was looking for. I ended up messing with the templating engine to get what I needed.

      I suggest OP choose Hugo over Zola, in the hopes that they find a theme that suits them best and for the most part prevents them from having to touch templating to begin with.

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    2 months ago

    This might be what you’re looking for: Zola

    Single binary that lets you keep your markdown/config in git and just build it from the git clone folder you’re in at the time.

    I know some people that have moved off of Hugo to this, and Alex from the Selfhosted podcast recently talked about it on their show.

  • SK@hub.utsukta.org
    6·
    2 months ago

    I found pelican to be quite simple to start with and depending on how deep you want to go it can be quite customizable. Being proficient in python helps.

  • Morethanevil@lemmy.fedifriends.socialEnglish
    71·
    2 months ago

    Use Publii, it has a WYSIWYG editor, a block editor and a markdown editor. It creates the files on your PC and can upload it to your server. Just point your webserver to the uploaded folder.

    Very beginner friendly ☝🏻

  • filcuk@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    In case you’re familiar with Obsidian, there’s Quartz: quartz.jzhao.xyz/ Runs in docker too, practically zero config to start

  • ctag@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    I did try setting up 11ty, despite my misgivings over node.js. Using Markdown went OK, except it wouldn’t render explicit <img> tag parameters to allow me to do one-off formatting.

    • shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lolEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      What templating languages do you know already, and are you running 11ty v3? There are some gotchas around images because (I think) the eleventy-image plugin is enabled by default.

      I’ve found success running with .webc which is effectively HTML until you need it to be more.

      • ctag@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Thank you for the advice! I’ll give webc a look before I check out the alternative platforms.

        I don’t know or really want to learn anything other than html/css or markdown. The site I’m trying to migrate was raw html/css, and I liked it well enough even though the shortcomings (and argument for template stuff) is very obvious.

  • xavier666@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    I think mkdocs is easier than hugo but less flexible in terms of capability. However it serves all my needs (list of webpages accessible from a central frontpage)

    • dudenas@slrpnk.netEnglish
      51·
      2 months ago

      Technically Grav is not a static site generator, it is just a flat file cms. It means there is no need to generate all the files of website and upload them to server each time you write a post. I have no idea why people like static sites for blogging.

    • exu@feditown.comEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      As the sibling comment says, not a static site generator. If you want to customize pretty much anything about the layout or theming you still need to use Twig, CSS and if you’re unlucky JS.

    • ctag@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Thanks for the recommendation. I actually did look at grav a while back, but I can’t recall why I moved on. Will give it another pass.