zola/README.md

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zola (né Gutenberg)

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A fast static site generator in a single binary with everything built-in.

Documentation is available on its site or in the docs/content folder of the repository and the community can use its forum.

Comparisons with other static site generators

Zola Cobalt Hugo Pelican
Single binary yes yes yes no
Language Rust Rust Go Python
Syntax highlighting yes yes yes yes
Sass compilation yes yes yes yes
Assets co-location yes yes yes yes
Multilingual site yes no yes yes
Image processing yes no yes yes
Sane & powerful template engine yes ehh ehh yes
Themes yes no yes yes
Shortcodes yes no yes yes
Internal links yes no yes yes
Link checker yes no no yes
Table of contents yes no yes yes
Automatic header anchors yes no yes yes
Aliases yes no yes yes
Pagination yes no yes yes
Custom taxonomies yes no yes no
Search yes no no yes
Data files yes yes yes no
LiveReload yes no yes yes
Netlify support ehh no yes no
Breadcrumbs yes no no yes
Custom output formats no no yes no

Supported content formats

  • Zola: markdown
  • Cobalt: markdown
  • Hugo: markdown, asciidoc, org-mode
  • Pelican: reStructuredText, markdown, asciidoc, org-mode, whatever-you-want

Template engine explanation

Cobalt gets ehh because, while based on Liquid, the Rust library doesn't implement all its features, and there is no documentation on what is and isn't implemented; the errors are cryptic; and Liquid itself is not powerful enough to do some of things you can do in Jinja2, Go templates, or Tera.

Hugo gets ehh because while it is probably the most powerful template engine in the list, after Jinja2, it personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator. Yes, this is a bit biased.

Pelican notes

Many features of Pelican are coming from plugins, which might be tricky to use because of version mismatch or lacking documentation. Netlify supports Python and Pipenv but you still need to install your dependencies manually.