Why should I use zola?

[suterma]

Documentation issue

Summary

This is by no means meant offensive; I am looking at various static site generators including zola, and some of them are mentioned here. I also read about zola's features.

Zola looks very nice, but I want to make an informed decision about an SSG.

Now for already involved folks this might be simple, but as a potential first-time user of "my own" SSG I wonder what actually are the advantages of zola over the others? Anyone might claim they are fast or easy, but there surely must be some more concrete distinction, otherwise none of these projects would exist.

Proposed solution

I suggest you make a short "elevator speech" paragraph or a simple comparison table somewhere on the home page or on GitHub, where you actually compare your project against other contenders, with the specific mention of advantages.

Some points, as a noob, I would be looking at is:

• How would CSS work, what existing frameworks would be compatible, or easy to use. (e.g. Bulma)
• Will it work with Markdown; there is CommonMark, yes, but what about other notations?. Can I include HTML or why not?
• Where do I store my images?
• Can I import / reformat / scrape an existing site? E.g. from GRAV?)
• Can I host my content on GitHub, then post automatically to my shared hoster?
• Why not use GitHub pages in the first place (they use Jekyll)
• What about content in multiple languages (A long standing annoyance with WordPress for example)

You see, these are very basic questions, but I am sure this project will benefit from having quick answers to these.

[Keats]

Hi

There was a comparison at some point with other SSGs but keeping it up to date is too hard and there are too many with completely different paradigms, eg how do you compare something like zola to a SSG where you use React. The React one is likely going to be more flexible but much more work.

The points are really from the homepage https://www.getzola.org/ :

• a binary so no npm/ruby env/python env to set up. You can even commit it in your repo if you want
• fast: there's a site that renders 120k+ pages in <30s
• (hopefully) simple to use

As for your points:

1. It should work with most CSS frameworks except Bulma basically because of their weird Sass file naming
2. It's explained in the second paragraph of https://www.getzola.org/documentation/getting-started/overview/#zola-at-a-glance
3. That has to be done manually
4. Not sure what you mean by post to the shared hoster but there are a bunch of deployment guides if you look at the sidebar on the left: https://www.getzola.org/documentation/getting-started/overview/
5. You can use GH pages with any SSG, all the zola sites are on GH pages
6. there is multi-language support (https://www.getzola.org/documentation/content/multilingual/) but the i18n part in the templates it not great

[suterma]

Thanks for answering these points. I really appreciate it, and zola is looking great as an SSG for me. Addressing some points:

• Just for reference, vue2 maintained such a comparison, and I liked it as a developer when being new to vue. It's also serving as a reassurance for the project's developers that they are actually adding value, not just creating another thing.
• I encountered the Bulma problems while researching, and I also devised a quite simple, yet effective workaround: Undefined mixins and variables: +control in extends.sass, +ltr and +rtl in icon.sass, and $control-padding-horizontal in input-textarea.sass jgthms/bulma#3675 (comment)
• For the deployment, I suggest you also include an explicit mention of how to publish with a shared hoster, mine is cyon, and they allow both FTP and SSH. I know it's likely too trivial to actually explain how to actually do it, but an entry in the sidebar you mentioned with very basic content, would make it clear that this is a thought-of option.
• Language support looks good enough for me.

Thanks to the zola team for giving us this great tool!