9 ms·
Why I do not like Hugo
- aidenn0 9y agoSlightly OT, but Is Wordpress still the only real solution for a professional looking blog for those that want a wysiwyg editor? My wife is starting a blog and wants me to set it up for her.
- mattkevan 9y agoA static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo paired with a CMS-as-a-service like Forestry or Contentful makes for a fast, no maintenance Wordpress alternative. And with a host like Surge or Netlify you can run an entire site for just the cost of a domain name.
- indigodaddy 9y agoAnd Netlify also offers Netlify CMS, which can accomplish the web-based composing urge.
- jonathonf 9y agoThat doesn't really answer the question - no static site generator {that I know of} is WYSIWYG in the same way as Wordpress. Yes, you can train people how to use a generator, but compared to a dynamic CMS they have a _much_ steeper learning curve {based on my experience training people about web publishing}. The closest I've seen is using Sandstorm with their static Wordpress site publishing but it's still nowhere near as smooth as plain Wordpress. (Edit: let's add some qualification because downvoting)
- indigodaddy 9y agoSandstorm also has a static producing Ghost instance, which is pretty decent, yet very dated in it's version.
- kot-behemoth 9y agoLektor (https://www.getlektor.com https://www.getlektor.com) is a static site generator with a simple admin interface (with WYSIWYG editor for markdown) which can be run locally. Publishing can also be done via a button in the UI. For even more user-friendliness, the site can be stored in Dropbox, so the user doesn't even need to know git.
- mattkevan 9y agoThe static generator is completely hidden to the end user. They log in, click add new post, add some text, style it in Markdown or HTML, upload a few images, add a few tags and click publish. Forestry commits the changes and Netlify runs a build. All the user sees of this is that their new post is now published. When I first started using static sites I would have agreed with you: there's no way I'd hand a normal user a markdown editor and a git repo and expect them to get on with it. But these new services do, in my opinion, solve the experience problem. However Wordpress is really good if you want to leverage the module ecosystem and do more complex stuff further down the line. Having used Wordpress for years I get excited about static sites' speed, simplicity and lack of constant security updates but it's not a one size fits all situation.
- perryprog 9y agoWhat's the difference of Forestry and Contentful? I've heard good things about Contentful, but I haven't heard of Forestry.
- jeremya 9y agoI've not used either, but Forestry seems like a CMS-to-static-pages tool while Contentful is a CMS-to-API tool.
- sgallant 9y agoCo-founder of https://forestry.io https://forestry.io here. Forestry.io is a Git-based CMS that commits content changes to your repo (and optionally builds/deploys your site). Contentful is an API-based CMS, that stores your content and requires you to query their API during/after build time.
- angeloashmore 9y agoIs your service coupled with Hugo?
- sgallant 9y agoNot sure what you mean by "coupled", but we support both Hugo and Jekyll sites.
- angeloashmore 9y agoAh, sorry, thought it was something more like Contentful that provides an API.
- perryprog 9y agoOh, ok that makes sense. So you would use Forestry if you're hosting static HTML from CMS, and Contentful for when you need an API for the CMS. (disclamer: I've never used CMS before so I don't really know how it works)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- codegeek 9y agoWordPress is probably not the only one but the issue with others is that at some point, you hit a wall with them. It is really hard to beat the ease of setting up WordPress (tons of 1 click hosts), ease of extending functionality (need social share? There is a plugin for that). If you need a blog for a non technical person, you just cannot beat WordPress. The codebase may be ugly but who cares.
- chipotle_coyote 9y agoWell, a reason to care about the ugly codebase is that unless you're 100% satisfied with somebody else's theme out of the box, you're going to be tweaking it in a child theme (or a full fork), and wow it's ugly. But having said that, the ecosystem of WordPress is really hard to beat. The original linked post complains that WordPress won't do Markdown without a plugin, but y'know, so what? Jetpack gives me Markdown and great site statistics without Google Analytics. Out of the box, I get a reasonably solid taxonomy system with per-category RSS feeds, threaded comments with Gravatar support, and an API that lets me publish drafts directly from offline clients (including Ulysses, the writing app I was already using). More plugins give me Akismet anti-spam, microformats, webmentions, and per-post crossposting to Tumblr and Dreamwidth. (And Facebook, Medium, and a dozen other systems, if I chose to use them.) There are a lot of things I don't love about WordPress, but the reality is that it's damn hard to beat its user experience. I'd love it if something else stepped up to be a modern WordPress, but Jekyll, Hugo, et. al. just aren't it. (They're terrific at some things--I maintain a different site with Lektor, using it for things that WordPress wouldn't actually be very good at--but it's not a blog.) Ghost is the closest attempt I'm aware of, but between their launch and their recent 1.0 release, they refocused on being a platform for "building and running a modern online publication. I can't help but feel there's still a real opportunity out there for "modern WordPress competitor," although I don't know if it's a market opportunity--which is, one suspects, why it remains unfilled.
- supremesaboteur 9y ago> The codebase may be ugly but who cares Code quality matters indirectly here. Wordpress is known for it's massive number of security flaws. If you don't watch for new versions and update regularly ( and who has time for that ? ) consider yourself hacked
- sturmen 9y agoSquarespace is wonderful from a WYSIWYG standpoint, and doesn't require immersing yourself in the WordPress ecosystem.
- indigodaddy 9y agoCheck out Publii. Desktop app for generating static sites/blogs for Mac/Win with some very attractive themes.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoThe problem with static sites is that you have to regenerate the site each time you make an update or new post... Wordpress just allows you to update it from the admin panel.
- deburo 9y agoDepends on what youre using to host the html files, but you can probably deploy in two commands. 1. generate your files 2. copy these files to your host Put these in a script, and your workflow becomes: update your content, then run your script.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mark212 9y agoMy experience with Hugo through v0.17 was that it takes ~1ms per post to generate. IIRc that was one of the major reasons why the author wrote, vastly increase the speed of regenerating the site.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoRight. But I can update my Wordpress site from my phone in China without a laptop running Hugo...
- mcbits 9y agoMaybe things are getting better these days (?), but at various points throughout its history, anyone could update your WordPress site from their phone in China.
- veidr 9y agoRight, and that's a truly killer feature if you happen to need it. Hugo doesn't address that problem at all, nor do Jekyll, which I currently use, and the other similar tools I've looked at. However, the missing step there (of rendering the static site and publishing it) seems well suited to being done "in the cloud" then on the client device where the posting/editing/typo. If you have a machine or VM on the Internet to use, this is not difficult to set up for yourself (any computer-proficient user with a little time can do it). But doing that is also nowhere near as trivial as WordPress makes it (any person at all can do it).
- laktek 9y agoI'm building something that you might find interesting. Pragma (https://pragma.build https://pragma.build), comes with a browser based Medium style editor and static page publishing by default. I've been running an invite only private beta for a few months now, and most of our early adopters were tech-savvy people who were asked by their friends/family to build a site. They love it because it's less setup and maintenance burden for them. I also plan to open source the project in the coming weeks, so you'd have greater flexibility of hosting it anywhere. If you like to give a try, request an invite on site (pragma.build) or send a DM (@PragmaApp) on Twitter.
- deburo 9y agoTryGhost. It's still limited in features, but it is good for simple blogs.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- e12e 9y agoWordPress hosted on wordpress.com without any 3rd party plugins is pretty solid. But ghost might be a decent alternative. If you want to self-host, you might want to consider cmsmadesimple.org as an alternative to wordpress (it's also php, but as the name implies it's simple - it's more of a cms than wordpress - but in a good way - it's more sensible if you want to customise it).
- fiatjaf 9y agoI've been experimenting with hosting the site content on GitHub, creating and editing posts with https://github.com/fiatjaf/coisas https://github.com/fiatjaf/coisas and auto-publishing with https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/pages/ https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/pages/
- mjmein 9y agoMy go-to replacement for Wordpress is Grav. It is a flat file cms, which means that it doesn't require any database. All posts are stored in markdown files with yaml front matter. However there is also an admin GUI frontend for non technical users. Not using a database makes it really simple to install or migrate servers (just copy the directory). On the other hand, being a dynamic PHP app means there is no explicit build step needed, and you can build any kind of plugin that you need. https://getgrav.org/ https://getgrav.org/
- jbergstroem 9y agoI'm happy with the abstraction that https://www.contentful.com/ https://www.contentful.com/ provides; be it a personal static site or more complex integrations which involves multiple content feeds. You get to define a content model and then just create away [within the limits of said model]. Their pricing is fair too (read: free for most). Edit: Downside(s) would include that $webmaster has to figure out whether to render content at browser or though "ssr".
- msh 9y agoGhost is the main competitor to work, comes as both hosted and self hosted.
- wishinghand 9y agoKirby CMS is the answer if you can install a plugin for wysiwyg and deal with Disqus for comments. There are Kirby plugins for comments that get saved locally, but I haven't experimented with them yet.
- FiloSottile 9y agoThis can't possibly have taken less to write than changing the capitalization of one letter, overriding a default, and reverting a commit (or even better, contributing a config option for the desired behavior!). And I say this not to flame about the author, but because it's a remarkable trend in the industry to complain (vocally!) about barely breaking changes in Open Source software. There is of course the angle of "you're getting it for free, for LTS buy a commercial product", but even more interesting to me is how it condemns projects to never moving, until they feel legacy, and we have to move on to something new.
- ams6110 9y agoYeah my impression was here's a guy using a free tool that is the product of a lot of work by a lot of people and now is whining that their vision for the product isn't exactly the same as his.
- thinkfurther 9y agoIt's not about the fact that something changed, but what changed. Full text to summary is quite the change to do based on -- who knows what? What progress, what advancement do you see here? And changing the default number of items from 15 to unlimited? I mean, not 50, not 100, not 500, but infinite? I see no purpose, just pitfalls. > even more interesting to me is how it condemns projects to never moving Oh yeah. Criticize any random silly move and you're against any and all progress, ever.
- randallsquared 9y ago> Oh yeah. Criticize any random silly move and you're against any and all progress, ever. Not this person, or that person, but after you add all of the complaints together, the aggregate could be against any change at all. That isn't saying "don't change", but it does suggest that the promise of forking and fixing is not being realized, perhaps because not enough people have the combination of time, interest, and ability to do so.
- thinkfurther 9y ago
- tyteen4a03 9y agoOT, but what is the best static site generator for mostly standalone pages except Jekyll (which broke Netlify)?
- imron 9y agoHugo!
- bachmeier 9y agoI don't want to get into any arguments about "best", but what works best for me is to write the pages in Markdown and use a Makefile to convert them all to html. There's always overhead with projects like Hugo, concerns about upgrading, and rough edges with respect to customization. If you just want to create standalone pages, a Makefile and Pandoc is about as simple and flexible as you can get. Edit: Here's the full code from one of my Makefiles: files := $(patsubst %.md,%,$(wildcard *.md)) all: for f in $(files); do \ pandoc -s -o $$f.html --template=template.html $$f.md; \ done
- Scarbutt 9y agoDoes that template.html has some css links? if so, is that something that comes with pandoc?
- bachmeier 9y agoIt's a modification of the default Pandoc template. I add css to it directly, but it can load css files if you wish. Think of it like this - there's a $body$ statement in the middle of the template. The html generated by Pandoc goes there. Everything else in the template file stays there. You can view the Pandoc html5 default here: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/blob/master/data/templates/default.html5 https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/blob/master/data/templates/def...
- ubercow 9y agoIf you want something a little more involved, https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ is a static site generator that uses pandoc under the hood. Uses a Haskell DSL
- sgallant 9y agoWe're building a WordPress-like CMS for Hugo sites. I'm curious if this would improve the Hugo experience for you (commits to your repo, supports media uploads, Markdown, etc). https://forestry.io/ https://forestry.io/ We're rolling out a feature soon that will allow you to specify the version of Hugo you're running.
- veidr 9y agoI'm curious, since you have experience supporting both Hugo and Jekyll: which would you recommend? Say I have a personal blog I've been maintaining for 15 years in BlogMaster 3000 for Windows 95, and now I want to make it modern and static and use forestry.io to handle the editing and publishing parts. Are there significant differences in terms of capabilities or ease of use depending on which static blog engine is used for the build step?
- sgallant 9y agoTLDR; If you care about build times, Hugo. Otherwise, Jekyll. For instance, we had a user who had a Jekyll site with 2000 pages. It took Jekyll about 5 mins to compile/build it. After migrating to Hugo it took < 1 second to build. If you don't care about build times, Jekyll has a great community, plugins, and IMO, superior templating syntax (liquid).
- osteele 9y agoMy “learn go” project was a Jekyll clone with fast build times https://github.com/osteele/gojekyll https://github.com/osteele/gojekyll It uses liquid for templating, and emulates a few plugins. It currently works on some sites, not others – YMMV.
- fiatjaf 9y agoThis guy has written a gigantic blog post to complain about the number of items in an RSS feed. That explains why his blog has over 2400 posts.
- j_s 9y agoAre there any walkthroughs from zero to all done of best practices to setup a product website using a static generator (Jekyll, Hugo, or whatever) rather than a blog? I started looking at the Hugo "quick start"[1], but then apparently the right way to work things as branches for GitHub pages is more choices[2]. Grabbing a theme that was optimized for more of a product page than a blog led to another warning[3] that the normal documentation wasn't going to be helpful. After that, I decided it would be best to ask for help! [1] https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/ https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/ [2] https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/ https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/ [3] https://themes.gohugo.io/kube/#GettingStarted https://themes.gohugo.io/kube/#GettingStarted "There are a few concepts this theme employs to make a personal documentation site. It’s important to read this as you may not see what you expect upon launching."
- m3adow 9y agoI'd recommend Jekyll for that. It's stable and established for such web sites. I used it for a product Web site years ago and it worked fine. If I remember correctly, there's even a tutorial in their official docs.
- activatedgeek 9y agoThe title of this post is misleading. It feels as if Hugo is plagued with tons of loads of problems (especially when so many people have upvoted!) where it is just ONE problem. Just ONE which is not even that hard a thing to resolve. OP please change the title to make sure it matches the actual blog.
- dang 9y agoSorry, that was my mistake. Fixed now.
- andrewshatnyy 9y agoI love Hugo. By far it is the fastest blog engine that I have seen. If I need a custom shit done then I will fork the repo and build the needed stuff myself. Bitching about the free software is unethical. Moreover, the source code is accessible. Change whatever code if you don't like it. In my experience I've had PRs rejected, so what? People have opinions and not everyone one think of your issue as the blocker. Move on. "Why don't I like scrambled eggs at that place" - no one cares. Make them yourself or go to another restaurant.
- thinkfurther 9y agoSimilarly, if you don't like someone's blog, don't read it. Or at least tell them, not us. Write a better blog or read another one. > A Reverend Donald Wildman in Mississippi heard something on the radio that he didn't like. Well, Reverend, did anyone ever tell you there are two KNOBS on the radio? -- George Carlin
- andrewshatnyy 9y agoNot following the analogy here... But one thing is to post a blog, another is to post a blog and share it on hacker news to generate feedback.
- thinkfurther 9y agoNo, it's not. Plus the person who wrote the blog post isn't the person who posted it to HN.
- jbergens 9y ago> Bitching about the free software is unethical. I disagree. Of course you should try to keep the language nice and show examples of things that cause you problems, features you are missing or things you don't like but the would be very little progress in OSS projects if no one are allowed to comment at all.
- andrewshatnyy 9y ago
- hugoagogogo 9y agoI run a small blog using Hugo. Some weeks ago I published a new article. All was well, until I visited it a few days ago and noticed all but the very most recent article link was broken. Apparently Hugo decided to transition article urls from PascalCase to lowercase without any sort of migration path, warning, or indication to say that things were about to break. You would think at least some thought would have been put into a migration path.
- ivm 9y agoI went through dozens of static site generators including Hugo and everything was so complicated and opinionated that I ended up writing 500 lines of my own. Also they all try to build a whole site when I just need to create some HTML files and put them into existing directories.