The Verdict Static site generators

You can see that these generators have many capabilities despite being minimalistic. Don’t get caught up in learning them all at once – you’ll never finish your site that way! Migrating from another platform is already built-in, so if you are leaving a commercial offering, check for importers. Hugo, Jekyll and Pelican already have ready scripts for importing from the major providers. Also, keep in mind that they have importers between each other, making it a standard procedure to switch.

All these program suites have a modular design, so when you look through what they do, this becomes apparent and the reason why even more so. They all started using existing code to convert between document formats. Since one output format would be HTML, it just made sense to build an entire site with the code. These modules are what makes importing old content to your new site easy.

Reading formats other than Markdown is another part that is modular. The MkPage suite uses Pandoc, which covers hundreds of formats for both source and target. The big three support two or more other formats than Markdown, plus the formats that their modules support. For Emacs enthusiasts, you can use OrgMode as a source in Pelican, Hugo and Jekyll. You even have major modes for Jekyll and Hugo. With these, you can manage your site from within Emacs.

In this collection, the big three are so polished, you can get your site up and running very quickly. The same goes for MkPage and Staticsite, but you will need more skills on the command line. The biggest challenge is to understand how themes work and how to use that to your advantage. With the big ones, you mostly use what others have created. With the new, smaller ones, you need to put in more legwork.

MkPage is small and great for learning how things work, but getting into it will take some time. There are scripts ready to use that can help you understand how the values work with your creation. This is a great way to keep it under your own thinking and control, even when you switch over to other systems. They use the same underlying principles. In fact, the Jinja2 template engine is so commonly used that you will know half of it when you have mastered it.