[DeepDive] Static site generators (Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Docusaurus, etc), CMSaaS (static wordpress, netlify cms, etc)

[0xdevalias]

(See also: #28)

Static Site Generators

• https://www.gatsbyjs.org/
• https://gohugo.io/
• https://jekyllrb.com/
• https://astro.build/
  • https://astro.build/themes
  • https://github.com/withastro/astro
• https://docusaurus.io/
  • https://v2.docusaurus.io/
  • https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus

    • Easy to maintain open source documentation websites.

• https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook

  • mdBook is a utility to create modern online books from Markdown files.

  • similar to https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook
• https://www.bridgetownrb.com/
  • https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown

    • A Webpack-aware, Ruby-powered static site generator for the modern Jamstack era

    • Bridgetown started life as a fork of the granddaddy of static site generators, Jekyll.

  • https://www.bridgetownrb.com/plugins/
• See also
  • https://hackernoon.com/10-static-site-generators-to-watch-in-2020-wt373yyi

Content Management Systems (CMS)

While traditional CMS's don't fit into the 'static site' category, there seems to be a growing trend of CMS-aaS, that provide CMS-like functionality, that is then 'compiled' into a static site/similar. This could be a nice tradeoff between the 'ease' of something like Wordpress, with the efficiency/security/low hosting cost of a static site.

• https://www.netlifycms.org/

  • Use Netlify CMS with any static site generator for a faster and more flexible web project

  • https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/add-to-your-site/
  • https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/start-with-a-template/
  • https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms
• https://headlesscms.org/
  • https://github.com/netlify/headlesscms.org

Wordpress Static Site Generators

• https://www.brianshim.com/webtricks/wordpress-static-site-generator/
• https://wp2static.com/

  • WordPress SSG for static site performance and security. Fully open source / code in the public domain.

  • https://wp2static.com/download/

    • All code is in the public domain and made available via our GitHub repositories. If you’re comfortable to use git and Composer, then that’s a great option for you. Buying a license above (US$49) otherwise provides pre-built installation zip files.

  • https://github.com/WP2Static
    • https://github.com/WP2Static/wp2static
    • https://github.com/WP2Static/static-html-output-plugin

      • WordPress plugin to generate a static copy of your site and deploy to GitHub Pages, S3, Netlify, etc. Increase security, pageload speed and hosting options. Connect WordPress into your CI/CD workflow.

• https://www.getshifter.io/

  • Using Shifter, create or migrate WordPress sites in minutes that are scalable, secure from attacks, and 100% static with no security or caching plugins required.

• https://www.hardypress.com/

  • The principle behind HardyPress is simple: visitors access a completely static version of your website. Your real WordPress installation lives on a separate domain and only runs when an editor needs to make some changes to the content.

Unsorted

• https://www.staticgen.com/
  • https://github.com/netlify/staticgen
• https://github.com/github/docs

  • This repository contains the documentation website code and Markdown source files for docs.github.com.

  • https://github.blog/2020-10-07-github-docs-are-now-open-source/
  • https://github.blog/2020-10-14-how-we-open-sourced-docs-github-com/
  • GitHub - docs.github.com - Open Source Friday (YouTube)

[0xdevalias]

tl;dr:

• https://github.com/actions/starter-workflows/tree/main/pages
• https://github.com/actions/starter-workflows/blob/main/pages/jekyll.yml

👋 !

We just announced official support for building/deploying Pages straight from GitHub Actions: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-07-27-github-pages-custom-github-actions-workflows-beta/

No hacks (no .nojekyll, no CNAME files), no need to push content back to a dedicated branch, etc. It's "streamlined" and while it doesn't look like much on the surface, lots of things have been simplified underneath to make it happen.

We wrote starter workflows for Pages for a few static site generators including one for plain Jekyll. By that I mean, a Gemfile is required and so is a _config.yml file but there are no "vendor locks" (in the name of security): you can depend on the latest version of Jekyll, use all plugins and all the themes you want. We don't meddle with your configuration file either because Actions is a secure sandbox.

I am aware that this is not a drop in replacement for what pages-gem provides today (a default theme, configuration file, etc.). This is also not exactly the objective of this new feature but we have to start somewhere! pages-gem today fills two goals: (a) provide the security requirements for a non-Actions build infrastructure, (b) provide default so sites can be built out of markdown files seamlessly without a user needing to even know what Jekyll is in the first place. I am not sure yet that we need pages-gem to answer (b) in a GitHub Actions world. I am hopefully my team or the community will figure out something soon enough.

This whole feature is in public beta today and I am very excited about it 🥳 This is certainly not perfect and will be iterated on but we want to hear your feedback. Here or on the new community site.

Originally posted by @yoannchaudet in github/pages-gem#651 (comment)