Publishing Sites with Markdown
flat file cms, static site generators, SSG
The number of engines is staggering, as there are around 500 of them, and even listing them is a cumbersome task. However, fear not, as I have found the ultimate and definitive listing of Static Site Generators, which includes all of them: Static Site Generators.
If you’re looking for another list of Static Site Generators for Jamstack Sites, you can check out StaticGen, which is now redirected to Jamstack.org. Additionally, there is a compilation of strictly flat-file CMS systems available at this repository here. Interestingly, the gathering and creation of these lists began with this gist. Happy exploring!
Selection of Very Good Ones
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Hugo is written in Go and that should not be a problem. Has a quite a few of themes. More popular than Grav (6000 stars). Search is wierd, as this is real static-site generator.
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Kirby is PHP but has the same problem as Grav as a folder is needed for every page. And it is not free.
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HTMLy has a real lack of documentation.
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Herbie is close to perfect, the only problem is German language. It has its own search functionality and it’s file naming is very strict.
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Pico is great (2000 stars) as is newer fork Phile which has the most flexible front-matter that I prefer. Both of them have little quality sites to showcase and totally lack search functionality.
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Baun is successor to Pico from the same author, and is perfect in every sense, but only 200 stars. Admin panel is not free.
Baun: A New Kind of PHP CMS - Gilbert Pellegrom -
Sphido is simple and also has a logical metadata format.
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Parvula is a simple & flexible PHP CMS generated from flat files with a complete RESTful API with active repo at ParvulaCMS/parvula
Too Weird
Others that I looked at are or too weird or simply outdated.
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Automad is PHP and even without a database offers searching
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mixu/ghost-render can render static blog sites from Markdown using Ghost themes
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Poole is a ancient simple static website generator from 2009 coded in Python at repo ~obensonne/poole