Comparing static site generators and how to onboard from a dynamic workflow

Mathias gave this talk at the first editing of the Static Web-Tech Meetup in San Francisco, at the Netlify office.

It cover how to move from a dynamic approach to building websites, to a modern approach based on static site generation, and maps out the landscape of static site generators.

Transcript

1. Dynamic to Static Onboarding to static site generation from a dynamic workflow @biilmann www.netlify.com
3. From Wordpress
 to Static
4. What does Wordpress Do?
5. Powers 24% of the Internet Not Wordpress 76% Wordpress 24%
6. Blows up all the time! Vulnerable Installs 79% Secure Installs 21%
7. When you upgrade a plugin
8. wp-admin wp-content PHP crap… Wordpress
9. WP-admin
10. WP-Includes
11. PHP Crap
12. A Static Approach What if we reengineered Wordpress as a Static Site Generator?
13. What is Static? It’s not about: Dynamic content vs static brochure Database vs Flat Files Writing HTML by hand
14. What is Static? No dynamic programming on the server A Caching Contract
15. Static Wordpress: WP-admin
16. Static Wordpress: WP-Includes
17. Static Wordpress: PHP Crap
18. Replacing The PHP Crap :) Picking a static site generator
19. Typical Static Site Generator Flow Lets look at netlify.com - currently a Jekyll based site
20. netlify.com admin
21. netlify.com “includes”
22. netlify.com the whole flow netlify CDN
23. Picking Your Static Site Generator What you should look for…
25. The Modern Static Site Generator Templating Asset Pipeline Content Metadata Filtering & Sorting Plugins
26. Mapping out the STG landscape Build Tools Build Tools/STG Full Fledged STG Specialized STG
27. What to look for: Asset Pipeline Sass/CoffeeScript/Babel.js/Less/Stylus/etc,etc,etc Composable? Extensible? vs Simple? No configuration? Bower? NPM?
28. What to look for: Content Typically Markdown ReStructuredText External APIs? Contentful, Prismic, Google Docs
29. What to look for: Metadata Frontmatter? YAML? JSON? TOML? Separate Data Document
30. What to look for: Filter & Sort Code in templates? Built-in Sort and Filter features? Easy helper methods?
31. What to look for: Plugins Can you write plugins? Plugin ecosystem? What’s possible with a plugin? Plugin Hooks?
32. Q/A What else do you want from a static site generator?
33. Thank You! mathias@netlify.com @biilmann www.netlify.com