[crdoconnor]

>It looks nice, but I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to.

I don't think that's true. It looks deceptively easy up front but the subtleties involved actually make it pretty hard. I've tried hugo, jekyll and pelican and they've all pissed me off for one reason or another. A common issue involves one of the 'template' themes I found on their template theme libraries not working on the "latest" version of the generator.

Ivy seems to have "solved" this problem by having almost no themes. This is not exactly the solution I was thinking of...

There's still a gap in the market here I think, and there will continue to be a proliferation (like how there was with bad javascript toolsets until jquery 'won' ~2007-8) until somebody makes an acceptably 'good' one or fixes an existing one until it obviously stands head and shoulders above the rest.

If you can make a well designed static site generator with lots of nice themes (or the potential for that) that doesn't fail horribly when I try to use it in a normal fashion I'd switch to it in a heartbeat and tell all of my friends. I'm using hugo now, but I'm not super happy about it: last problem with that being that I couldn't get it to competently handle breadcrumb navigation.

[ams6110]

> Ivy seems to have "solved" this problem by having almost no themes. This is not exactly the solution I was thinking of...

Yes, it really is a chicken-egg problem where I think you need to start with at least a half-dozen attractive themes to get attention.

Theme designers are not going to build themes for a site generator that nobody uses. And nobody (relatively) is going to use a site generator that has only a "document" theme.

Generators like Hugo, for whatever their faults, have dozens of really nice-looking themes so it's easy to find something close to what you want and either use it as-is or make some minor tweaks.

[crdoconnor]

I don't think the chicken-egg problem is that bad, the themes are all open source and you can port them. Many exist for a few generators.

A lot of the themes on generators like Hugo are ugly or don't work too.

Probably porting a group of 10 nice ones would be enough.

[bgrohman]

It makes sense that the static site generators with lots of bells an whistles are harder to get right, especially if they’re trying to build an ecosystem with plugins and themes where others can contribute. I’m considering the _simple_ generators like the one posted here, though. My original thought/question was why not just write your own if you have a simple use case? There have been some good answers here such as no programming knowledge, lack of experience with html/css, or wanting to spend your time on other projects.

[crdoconnor]

I think even "simple" generators are harder than they look. Plus, those 'bell and whistle' features quickly end up becoming critical once you scale up from a few pages.

Also yea, don't really want to do CSS and web design just to put a bit of content online. Hence why these things exist.