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Honestly I haven't found any I really like. Gatsby for example I found overly bloated (eg. requiring GraphQL - with which you can't even dynamically generate qu
by JDiculous 7y ago
Honestly I haven't found any I really like. Gatsby for example I found overly bloated (eg. requiring GraphQL - with which you can't even dynamically generate queries) without offering everything I need out of the box (eg. Disqus integration), build times felt long, and there are very little templates (at least last time I used it) and like other SSGs switching a template basically requires re-architecting your whole app.
I think the biggest weakness with these SSGs is the difficulty of switching themes. With a CMS like Wordpress, changing themes takes no work, you just specify a new theme. In any popular SSG, changing themes generally means re-architecting your codebase, requiring a developer to dive into the codebase and spend an insignificant amount of time (leading one to question the value of their SSG framework), or otherwise abandon their current project and start over on the new template from scratch.
Because changing themes is such a hassle and time sink, if you just want to use a pre-made template and be done with it, then I actually recommend you look for the template you want first on ANY popular SSG, and then just use that (Jekyll seems to have the largest section of templates).
If you're planning to make your own custom template and you're a developer, then honestly I recommend you to just create your own project without these SSG frameworks, unless you just really happen to like the (often super overly opinionated) stack that they tie you into (that won't be cool anymore a year later as developers flock to the next shiny thing). Even then I think you'll find yourself working against the framework more often then you'd like, pretty much defeating the purpose. For my needs I found it easier to just parse my own Markdown files and use an npm library like showdown to convert them to HTML, and then just develop in my preferred stack.