Programming language

Your choice may be dictated by the language.

These projects are built in many languages. However, they all end up with the languages needed for your site: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. To get things to work, you need to use web-based techniques. To use the projects, though, you do not need to be fluent in the languages designers wrote them in. Only when you feel you want to contribute does this become a serious consideration.

It does affect contributors, though. You should consider whether you need to tweak the programs themselves or not.

Most work you will do is tweaking aspects of the final result. To do this, you need to know the templating language, which is built on the idea that you can write HTML with variables and conditional statements. The other things you need are YAML, TOML or JSON; most people can learn theses in ten minutes as they are not much more than a data formats.

Commercial support is more important for adoption rates which in turn makes development efforts more intense. This makes language an important aspect to consider. Will the choice of language affect the viability of the project? Do you need to have a lot of developments or do you aim to build your scripts around the generator you choose?

After you have learned the templating language, you can use a shell script to set up the rest of your projects. Obviously, you may want to use the language of the project you are using – Go for Hugo, Python for Pelican and so on. However, you can usually pick whatever language you want to call the binaries and build your site. Have all that in mind when you choose the system for your next web project.