alt Hacker NewsA long while ago I wrote a very simple static site generator for personal site, mainly just to play around with using GitHub/Cloudflare pages to host my personal site.
Then a couple of months ago I started comparing the big SSG tools after wanting something a bit less held together with duct tape... after a lot of experimenting I settled on 11ty at the time, but I really don't enjoy writing Liquid templates, and writing reusable components using Liquid felt very clumsy. I just wish it was much easier to use the JSX based templates with 11ty, but every step of the way feels like I'm working against the "proper" way to do things.
So over Christmas holiday I been playing around with NextJS SSG, and while it does basically everything I want (with some complicated caveats) I also can't help feel like I'm trying to use a oil rig to make a pilot hole when a drill would do just fine...
Anyone got any recommendations on something somewhere in between 11ty and NextJS? I'd love something that's structured similar to 11ty, but using JSX with SSG that then gets hydrated into full blown client side components.
The other thing I've been meaning to try is going back to something custom again, but built on top of something like Tempest [1] to do most the heavy lifting of generating static pages, but obviously that wouldn't help at all with client side components.
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I moved my startup’s marketing site and blog from NextJS to Astro, and I’m happy with it. It’s in that middle ground—focused on primarily static sites but with the ability to still write bits of backend logic as needed.
I found it hard to get next to reliably treat static content as actually static (and thus cacheable), and it felt like a huge bundle of complexity for such a simple use case.
> after a lot of experimenting I settled on 11ty at the time, but I really don't enjoy writing Liquid templates, and writing reusable components using Liquid felt very clumsy. I just wish it was much easier to use the JSX based templates with 11ty, but every step of the way feels like I'm working against the "proper" way to do things.
Doesn't Eleventy support most of the common old-school templating languages? I once converted a site using Mustache from Punch [1] to Eleventy.
Eleventy is great, and in some ways I prefer it to Hugo if build time isn't an issue. At least templates don't break, like most of the comments here say.
I eventually redid the site from scratch (with a bit of vibecoding magic back when v0 got me into it) with Astro.
[1] https://github.com/laktek/punch