Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/6-static-blog-generators-arent-jekyll/
In a previous article, I compared WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging platform, with Jekyll, a less-conventional approach to blogging whereby you create all of your content inside local text files before running a command to generate a purely static version of your blog. Jekyll has a range of benefits:
- You have far more control over every aspect of your blog.
- Since there’s no database involved, the performance is unbeatable.
- Many find blogging from their desktop to be more intuitive.
But while Jekyll is by far the most popular static blog generator, and it’s the one I recommend for first-timers, there are many to choose from.
Let’s talk about some of the most interesting alternatives.
1. Middleman
Jekyll has become increasingly flexible with each release but, at its core, it encourages bloggers to follow a precise set of conventions. This is a big part of its user friendliness but some might find it limiting.
If, after playing around with Jekyll, you find yourself wishing that it had feature X or Y, check out Middleman. It’s built upon the same language — Ruby — but, right out of the box, it’s far more flexible.
Here are a few reasons to love Middleman:
- While there’s a “Blog” module, you’re not confined to sticking with the basic structure of a blog. You can build much more complex websites.
- There are plenty of great plugins available, like sitemap generation, image optimization, local gzipping, and all sorts of deployment solutions.
- An incredible amount of functionality and flexibility can be found within the main configuration file.
But since Middleman can do a lot more, it’s also trickier to get a handle on, compared to Jekyll. It’s not overtly difficult, but you will have to spare a little extra time and attention to manipulating it to your will.