Moving Away from My Home-brew SSG #

For over three years, I've been dogfooding my personal site with the same static site generator of my own, dummy-ssg. It's a simple CLI program I wrote in PHP, which, originally designed for my own site, turned out to as well power some community websites where I was involved, as it developed as a generic SSG.

The program is quite lightweight: just less than 200 lines of code at its core with a vendored Markdown parsing library. It supports writing templates in PHP, the language itself already being a powerful hypertext preprocessor.

Since I created the whole thing, I know how everything works and can easily patch it when needed. Plus, since templates are essentially written in a programming (scripting) language, they enjoy great extensibility too. For those reasons, I had always stuck to my home-brew SSG.

A few days ago when I was helping with a friend's website, I had chance to work with the Zola SSG again. Prior to that I had worked with Zola (and I liked it), but this time I wanted to try migrating my own site to it and see if it was a good idea.

It took me two days to migrate my entire site. Because my templates are vastly PHP code, I spent most of my time rewriting them using an actual template language. And due to how Zola handles pages and sections very differently, I also had to restructure my directories.

Now that I'm on Zola, I can finally enjoy features that I've never bothered to work on for dummy-ssg:

While I will miss not having to write a title in the front matter (because dummy-ssg automatically uses the first top-level heading found in the Markdown), I'm happy to be on Zola now.

This page is released into the public domain under CC0 1.0.