7 ms·

While this is slightly off-topic, does anyone have any current opinions on Jekyll / Pelican / Middleman / etc? In particular websites which are only part blog.

itake 11y ago
I think they are great, but because statically generated sites can limit growth, just because if you want to add backend features (forms, commenting, etc.), you may have to switch platforms or use third party services. I host my own blog on Jekyll and that works awesomely well and I have no plans for needing a backend server. If I was a startup and wanted to add small marketing features (email collection, surveys, etc.) then I would consider moving off of it.
- spdustin 11y ago
  Not related to the original article, but that's an ideal use-case for Amazon Lambda.
- sgallant 11y ago
  I just set up a Jekyll site on S3 and used formkeep.com for form endpoints. Worked great (but costs $7/month).
  - icebraining 11y ago
    It's amazing how companies can charge almost the same for what's essentially an HTTP handler that saves a few POSTed field as Netflix charges for streaming unlimited films and series. And yet, I can totally see why it makes sense to pay, since handling yet another service that you must keep up is just annoying and time-consuming.
  - MarioSpeedwagon 11y ago
    If you want to try a great free one that's all SSL, Hook Forms (.com) is in beta. I don't mean to pimp, but we really would love more testing and would send you an invitation right away. Plus, the free thing.
    - budparr 11y ago
      Hook Forms looks good. I'll post it to our tools section at The New Dynamic. Will it always be free, at least for some functionality?
- hamxiaoz 11y ago
  They can all be accomplished by utilizing MailChimp: - Emails signups - Contact form
danso 11y ago
Middleman is amazing, I build all of my sites with it...it's a nice mix of Jekyll's ease with the flexibility of being able to write as much templating/backend logic as you need (basically, the ability to use Erb). For any site in which you don't need a database, in which your content can be serialized as several hundred JSON/yaml objects, I think Middleman is fantastic.
- astockwell 11y ago
  +1, I started with Jekyll for my personal site but quickly switched. Ultimately I found Middleman had much more functionality baked in, especially things like the ability to use a yaml file of projects to drive a portfolio page, or to fetch a series of release URLs from GitHub and include them on a page upon build. Probably all possible with Jekyll, but not as easily at the time. YMMV.
  - danso 11y ago
    Jekyll now supports data files that can be used in roughly the same way...so I've actually been able to build decent sites with just Jekyll, when I need to collaborate with someone else, as Jekyll is much more common a platform and has the bonus of being able to "just work" with Github pages if you don't add any plugins.
seagreen 11y ago
Hakyll is fantastic -- works great as a blog, but is also very extensible. I used Nanoc before that and it was also excellent. I don't think you want Pelican or Jekyll in this case. Their emphasis is definitely on blogging and you'll have to fight them some if you move away from that niche.
- wuschel 11y ago
  Are there any examples of a non-blog use case with Hakyll e.g. a partly static, partly generated website? How does Hugo compare to Hakyll?
  - mreid 11y ago
    I haven't used Hugo but my entire site is generated with Hakyll: http://mark.reid.name/ http://mark.reid.name/ . I've found it works well for a mixture of blogging and more static content.
    - wuschel 11y ago
      Thanks for the example. Can you compare Hakyll to other static site generators?
      - seagreen 11y ago
        Hakyll will be very similar to something like Nanoc. The difference will be mainly in the language and ecosystem -- compared to normal languages Haskell is pretty weird. That said, Haskell is also _incredibly awesome_ and especially well suited to static site generation. Plus Pandoc is possibly the best format conversion tool out there. But I would only use if if you either already know Haskell or are curious and will enjoy playing around and learning new things.
krick 11y ago
What exactly opinions do you want? I tried all of that stuff except of Middleman and ended up writing my own. Jekyll is way too opinionated, no way to make the website exactly what you want it to be. Hakyll is very configurable, but the very fact that it's written in Haskell and needs to be recompiled after every structural change turned out to be way more annoying than I thought. Pelican would be nice, but the last I checked it was quite unstable and buggy, unlike Jekyll and Hakyll. In the end I thought that writing 200 lines of Python code to do exactly what I want is easier, than to explore what's out there and how to make it to do what I want.
hardwaresofton 11y ago
I personally like Harp for it's simplicity (which mostly comes from NPM and node magic): http://harpjs.com/ http://harpjs.com/ http://harpjs.com/docs/quick-start http://harpjs.com/docs/quick-start
- fustkilas 11y ago
  Another happy Harp user here. The team behind Harp has also created Surge (http://surge.sh/ http://surge.sh/) which is simple & well thought out. I find that Harp and Surge get in the way the least, thanks to "convention over configuration". Just give me my Jade & Stylus, thank you very much. I'd be interested in hearing how others use Harp with current tooling - React / CSS modules / JSPM anyone?
mbrock 11y ago
make and bash go a long way!
Zikes 11y ago
For Go fans, I had a lot of fun playing with Hugo: https://github.com/spf13/hugo https://github.com/spf13/hugo
frigg 11y ago
I tried Pelican just to see how they work and what's so special about static site generators. The downside for me was having to go through the process of re-generating the site and committing just so you can fix something as simple as a grammar error or a comma. It gets old fast IMO. The other annoyance was with images included in the post. You have to copy then write the image path because you don't have something like a pop-up box which just selects the image. So I switched to ghost and I'm fairly happy for now. The downside of this is that I have to pay ~$4 a month for a shared hosting, which is fine by me.
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  I've yet to try it but that's the downside that would slightly annoy me. Probably not enough to turn me off of it, but maybe. Would post-commit hooks and some kind of automation make it easier?
  - Zikes 11y ago
    Hugo has an option built-in to watch the directory and rebuild pages automatically. It can also reload the browser automatically using the optional LiveReload plugin: http://gohugo.io/overview/usage/ http://gohugo.io/overview/usage/
    - wuschel 11y ago
      Interesting. In general: What would be the best approach towards having a part of the website static (main part), and only the blog/press part being regenerated? Does Hugo/Pelican/Jekyll/Hakyll etc handle this kind of functionality? As an alternative, what would be a good light weight CMS these days (ideally in Python)?
    - acchan 11y ago
      Pelican does too. Just use 'make regenerate' instead of 'make publish': http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/publish.html#make http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/publish.html#make
- 11y ago
iheart2code 11y ago
I'm using Jekyll for my portfolio, and it is working out quite well. Unfortunately, I can't get paging to work on multiple collections at once. So it would be great for a site that's ONLY a blog or ONLY a portfolio, but I recently added a blog and it seems to be holding me back. Portfolio: http://www.thejeremywhite.com/ http://www.thejeremywhite.com/ Source: https://github.com/iheart2code/iheart2code.github.io https://github.com/iheart2code/iheart2code.github.io
0xCMP 11y ago
I use jekyll but since I've been learning Go I have wanted to use Hugo which seems to have a lot of nice features. Middleman seems to have the most features though. Still, it's nice that jekyll doesn't require much work to deploy to github.
budparr 11y ago
I've used Jekyll (quite a bit), Metalsmith, and Hugo and tested some others. They all fit a particular use-case, like Hugo is incredibly fast, Metalsmith is incredibly flexible (it's something like a Gulp for static sites), and Jekyll is well-rounded, has a large community, and has the most progress with content editors for non-technical users. I run a site with resources for static site generators, The New Dynamic, and you can find a lot of articles on those and others there: http://www.thenewdynamic.org/ http://www.thenewdynamic.org/
kmfrk 11y ago
Jekyll has a huge community, is actively maintained (it being the backbone of GitHub’s blog system) with plenty of plugins, and has pretty decent documentation (that can always be expanded with a pull request). I find those factors tend to trump smaller shortcomings. There’s always going to be some stuff, but being able to ask a question and get an answer is very important. Take that from someone who did his first static blog in Blogofile … Windows support has been non-existent, which is obviously huge to some, but Jekyll 3 aims to remedy that. I haven’t played around with Jekyll 3 on Windows, though, so you only have their word for it. Ruby on Windows is already … interesting.

itake 11y ago

I think they are great, but because statically generated sites can limit growth, just because if you want to add backend features (forms, commenting, etc.), you may have to switch platforms or use third party services. I host my own blog on Jekyll and that works awesomely well and I have no plans for needing a backend server. If I was a startup and wanted to add small marketing features (email collection, surveys, etc.) then I would consider moving off of it.

spdustin 11y ago
Not related to the original article, but that's an ideal use-case for Amazon Lambda.
sgallant 11y ago
I just set up a Jekyll site on S3 and used formkeep.com for form endpoints. Worked great (but costs $7/month).
- icebraining 11y ago
  It's amazing how companies can charge almost the same for what's essentially an HTTP handler that saves a few POSTed field as Netflix charges for streaming unlimited films and series. And yet, I can totally see why it makes sense to pay, since handling yet another service that you must keep up is just annoying and time-consuming.
- MarioSpeedwagon 11y ago
  If you want to try a great free one that's all SSL, Hook Forms (.com) is in beta. I don't mean to pimp, but we really would love more testing and would send you an invitation right away. Plus, the free thing.
  - budparr 11y ago
    Hook Forms looks good. I'll post it to our tools section at The New Dynamic. Will it always be free, at least for some functionality?
hamxiaoz 11y ago
They can all be accomplished by utilizing MailChimp: - Emails signups - Contact form

danso 11y ago

Middleman is amazing, I build all of my sites with it...it's a nice mix of Jekyll's ease with the flexibility of being able to write as much templating/backend logic as you need (basically, the ability to use Erb). For any site in which you don't need a database, in which your content can be serialized as several hundred JSON/yaml objects, I think Middleman is fantastic.

astockwell 11y ago
+1, I started with Jekyll for my personal site but quickly switched. Ultimately I found Middleman had much more functionality baked in, especially things like the ability to use a yaml file of projects to drive a portfolio page, or to fetch a series of release URLs from GitHub and include them on a page upon build. Probably all possible with Jekyll, but not as easily at the time. YMMV.
- danso 11y ago
  Jekyll now supports data files that can be used in roughly the same way...so I've actually been able to build decent sites with just Jekyll, when I need to collaborate with someone else, as Jekyll is much more common a platform and has the bonus of being able to "just work" with Github pages if you don't add any plugins.

seagreen 11y ago

Hakyll is fantastic -- works great as a blog, but is also very extensible. I used Nanoc before that and it was also excellent. I don't think you want Pelican or Jekyll in this case. Their emphasis is definitely on blogging and you'll have to fight them some if you move away from that niche.

wuschel 11y ago
Are there any examples of a non-blog use case with Hakyll e.g. a partly static, partly generated website? How does Hugo compare to Hakyll?
- mreid 11y ago
  I haven't used Hugo but my entire site is generated with Hakyll: http://mark.reid.name/ http://mark.reid.name/ . I've found it works well for a mixture of blogging and more static content.
  - wuschel 11y ago
    Thanks for the example. Can you compare Hakyll to other static site generators?
    - seagreen 11y ago
      Hakyll will be very similar to something like Nanoc. The difference will be mainly in the language and ecosystem -- compared to normal languages Haskell is pretty weird. That said, Haskell is also _incredibly awesome_ and especially well suited to static site generation. Plus Pandoc is possibly the best format conversion tool out there. But I would only use if if you either already know Haskell or are curious and will enjoy playing around and learning new things.

krick 11y ago

What exactly opinions do you want? I tried all of that stuff except of Middleman and ended up writing my own. Jekyll is way too opinionated, no way to make the website exactly what you want it to be. Hakyll is very configurable, but the very fact that it's written in Haskell and needs to be recompiled after every structural change turned out to be way more annoying than I thought. Pelican would be nice, but the last I checked it was quite unstable and buggy, unlike Jekyll and Hakyll. In the end I thought that writing 200 lines of Python code to do exactly what I want is easier, than to explore what's out there and how to make it to do what I want.

hardwaresofton 11y ago

I personally like Harp for it's simplicity (which mostly comes from NPM and node magic): http://harpjs.com/ http://harpjs.com/ http://harpjs.com/docs/quick-start http://harpjs.com/docs/quick-start

fustkilas 11y ago
Another happy Harp user here. The team behind Harp has also created Surge (http://surge.sh/ http://surge.sh/) which is simple & well thought out. I find that Harp and Surge get in the way the least, thanks to "convention over configuration". Just give me my Jade & Stylus, thank you very much. I'd be interested in hearing how others use Harp with current tooling - React / CSS modules / JSPM anyone?

mbrock 11y ago

make and bash go a long way!

Zikes 11y ago

For Go fans, I had a lot of fun playing with Hugo: https://github.com/spf13/hugo https://github.com/spf13/hugo

frigg 11y ago

I tried Pelican just to see how they work and what's so special about static site generators. The downside for me was having to go through the process of re-generating the site and committing just so you can fix something as simple as a grammar error or a comma. It gets old fast IMO. The other annoyance was with images included in the post. You have to copy then write the image path because you don't have something like a pop-up box which just selects the image. So I switched to ghost and I'm fairly happy for now. The downside of this is that I have to pay ~$4 a month for a shared hosting, which is fine by me.

brazzledazzle 11y ago
I've yet to try it but that's the downside that would slightly annoy me. Probably not enough to turn me off of it, but maybe. Would post-commit hooks and some kind of automation make it easier?
- Zikes 11y ago
  Hugo has an option built-in to watch the directory and rebuild pages automatically. It can also reload the browser automatically using the optional LiveReload plugin: http://gohugo.io/overview/usage/ http://gohugo.io/overview/usage/
  - wuschel 11y ago
    Interesting. In general: What would be the best approach towards having a part of the website static (main part), and only the blog/press part being regenerated? Does Hugo/Pelican/Jekyll/Hakyll etc handle this kind of functionality? As an alternative, what would be a good light weight CMS these days (ideally in Python)?
  - acchan 11y ago
    Pelican does too. Just use 'make regenerate' instead of 'make publish': http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/publish.html#make http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/publish.html#make
11y ago

iheart2code 11y ago

I'm using Jekyll for my portfolio, and it is working out quite well. Unfortunately, I can't get paging to work on multiple collections at once. So it would be great for a site that's ONLY a blog or ONLY a portfolio, but I recently added a blog and it seems to be holding me back. Portfolio: http://www.thejeremywhite.com/ http://www.thejeremywhite.com/ Source: https://github.com/iheart2code/iheart2code.github.io https://github.com/iheart2code/iheart2code.github.io

0xCMP 11y ago

I use jekyll but since I've been learning Go I have wanted to use Hugo which seems to have a lot of nice features. Middleman seems to have the most features though. Still, it's nice that jekyll doesn't require much work to deploy to github.

budparr 11y ago

I've used Jekyll (quite a bit), Metalsmith, and Hugo and tested some others. They all fit a particular use-case, like Hugo is incredibly fast, Metalsmith is incredibly flexible (it's something like a Gulp for static sites), and Jekyll is well-rounded, has a large community, and has the most progress with content editors for non-technical users. I run a site with resources for static site generators, The New Dynamic, and you can find a lot of articles on those and others there: http://www.thenewdynamic.org/ http://www.thenewdynamic.org/

kmfrk 11y ago

Jekyll has a huge community, is actively maintained (it being the backbone of GitHub’s blog system) with plenty of plugins, and has pretty decent documentation (that can always be expanded with a pull request). I find those factors tend to trump smaller shortcomings. There’s always going to be some stuff, but being able to ask a question and get an answer is very important. Take that from someone who did his first static blog in Blogofile … Windows support has been non-existent, which is obviously huge to some, but Jekyll 3 aims to remedy that. I haven’t played around with Jekyll 3 on Windows, though, so you only have their word for it. Ruby on Windows is already … interesting.