A Toast to Jamstack
While most websites have gotten extremely complicated and bloated over the last 15 years, it’s still possible to create a site that is fast, small, and secure by default. Jamstack is a combination of JavaScript, APIs and Markup that can be used to make a static website with dynamic features provided by third party services.
There are plenty of Static Site Generators (SSG) (355 listed when this was published) that can help build your site in pretty much every imaginable language. And there are also a number of Headless CMSs that can be used to make editing of the site content easy for non-software-developers.
Publii
One of the easiest SSGs is Publii. It’s a free, open source, and local first program that runs on your machine. It’s excellent for non-technical users or those wanting a graphical way to edit their content. This blog is currently created using Publii since I wanted to give it a good test.
The biggest drawback is integration with other programs. Publii does not yet allow post-build scripts to be run automatically. It does have a plugin system, but building a Publii plugin is more suited to software developers than average users. Though there are some nice plugins available already.
Soupault
On the other end of the spectrum is Soupault. It is by far the most flexible and powerful SSG that I’ve ever used, my current experience being Jekyll, Nanoc, Middleman, and Zola. (And long ago WordPress…but we won’t talk of such horrors here.)
Soupault has a unique philosophy of “modify HTML with HTML” that makes it incredibly powerful. With most SSGs at some point you start running into the wall of how they were intended to be used vs. what you need them to do. Soupault can be extended in virtually any way you can imagine.
Other SSGs
Other Tools
Statical is a calendar generator for static sites. It is intended to be used in a “Static Site Generator chain” (credit to CloudCannon for the term). An example chain might look like the following:
- soupault (or your favorite static site generator)
- statical
- Pagefind (or tinysearch, stork, orama, or similar)
- Jampack
- deploy or sync your site