Recently I was browsing a story about the death of Eleventy on Lobste.rs and a comment from u/kel caught my eye:
This is why I like Lume. It's basically just glue for your site's build scripts. If it died as a project it wouldn't be too hard to bash together rocks for an afternoon and replace enough of what it does for my own purposes.
I hadn't seen Lume before, but this pitch appealed to me. Most of my SSG experience is with Hugo, and I have always found it burdensome to work with. Looking at their homepage, a Mastodon testimonial stuck out:
Once again big thanks to @cadey for showing me @lume.
Out of all static site builders I used in the past few years, this was the most smooth and pleasant experience of building a website.
In the time I've been reading developer blogs, I've found that recommendations from Xe have a damn good hit rate. So I gave it a shot, and ended up rebuilding my website (this site) from scratch.
Lume gets out of your way. It gives you just enough SSG to let you focus on building what you want to build, and it's wonderfully modular.
Because it's a JavaScript project, Lume gives you access to a huge ecosystem of web-dev tools, and it lets you configure them directly. Getting GHFM-style Markdown callouts working in Hugo was a headache for me. In Lume, it's trivial because you've got the full power of markdown-it at your disposal and you can just hook a plugin directly into the parser.
Holy shit a Markdown callout poggers
What's that you say? You want to write arbitrary TypeScript functions and expose them to your templates? That's trivial too.
Static websites are not complicated!! Why do we make them so challenging, and why are we sapping the joy out of building them? Lume is a breath of fresh air coming from Hugo. It's so clean and intuitive. I highly recommend you give it a try.