[dflock]

The tools (mostly) all start out simple, as you described. Then they start to get traction and users. More users equals more diverse use cases and feature requests. Each individual request makes sense, for that group of users, and is implemented. Slowly the software grows in complexity, until you have Hugo etc... Then people say it's too complex and start over - and it all happens again.

This applies to all software - and most other things that humans make that have large numbers of users, like governments, countries, or other systems.

[dmbaturin]

Delegating the complexity to the user was my biggest motivation behind many features of soupault.

Hugo has two different Markdown libraries baked in and you have to choose them, and it also had hardcoded commands to call rST and AsciiDoc processors. If you are migrating from a different SSG, Markdown processors behavior differences can bite you and there's no way out.

With soupault, you just configure a command to convert a file with a certain extension to HTML, and all features (ToC, footnotes, anything provided by plugins...) work the same because they they are implemented by manipulating the parsed HTML element tree.

Want a CSS preprocessor? You can pipe <style> tag contents through any external program if you feel like it. Want to re-compress or manipulate images? You can write a Lua script that gets their paths from <img> and <picture> tags and calls an external program on their files. And so on.

[njrc9]

Happy user of Soupault here. What you described here:

> Markdown processors behavior differences can bite you and there's no way out.

is under appreciated. The lack of “surprises” in Soupault is very appreciated.