3 ms·

Author here. At it's core most static site generators are just fancy "string concatenation" tools. In my experience playing with several generators before bui

Author here. At it's core most static site generators are just fancy "string concatenation" tools. In my experience playing with several generators before building Elder.js it isn't so much about the output that matters it is about how the static site generator lets you do non-trivial customization. Things that would be hard without a larger framework. More importantly, when building a major project on a static site generator, it is important to have an upgrade path beyond a static site generator should you require it. Elder.js was built with that use case in mind though I didn't cover that in the article. Being able to move to SSR should the project require it is a huge plus in my book.

eatonphil 5y ago
> At it's core most static site generators are just fancy "string concatenation" tools. I think that's a bit reductive (especially since template libraries themselves are already complicated, not in a bad way). To me a static site generator is: 1) a string template library, plus 2) a file system walker/trigger to generate from a template, plus 3) additional data to feed the templates, plus 4) the actual content. Then there's of course the additional features you may or may not need: a tagging system, a comment system, a subscription system, etc. Thankfully despite all these components you don't need to write much of the actual code since they all exist as builtin (file system walking) or major OSS (Jinja, Mustache.js, etc) libraries. The SSG is primarily glue.