• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Edit: tl;dr is that Grav worked out of the box.

    Bear in mind that I just started messing around with Grav, so I’m no expert. With that being said, I tried 11ty and Hugo (spent 2-3 weeks messing around testing them).

    What I was looking for was a static site generator that let me easily use a simple/clean theme, and would generate the webpages from markdown files.

    What prompted me to look for this was my Wordpress site breaking. I’m currently self hosting wordpress via docker. While retooling my server (install updated server os, import raid, relaunch containers), my Wordpress container broke. It was still serving my website, but I couldn’t do anything on the backend because of a database permission error. I had just spent a day fighting with and fixing database permissions on another container, and I decided I wanted to look into these ssgs and see if it would simplify dealing with my website.

    11ty seemed really promising until I tried to theme it with a starter pack. What was confusing to me at first was that 11ty doesn’t theme like you think of theming something like Wordpress. You don’t set up/intstall 11ty, and then download/install a theme. Instead, you use a starter pack, which is a theme that includes an implementation of 11ty. (You can write your own theme with a barebones 11ty setup, but I’m not a web dev and don’t want to be.) I must have tried 15 different 11ty starter packs, and not a single one of them worked and/or was maintained, and these were the ones linked/provided on the 11ty website.

    Had I found a pack/theme that worked (and met my criteria of being a simple/clean theme), I’d have been very happy with 11ty. The core of 11ty worked great for me (take a .md file and make it html), but the starter pack situation IMO is a disaster to anyone who isn’t a competent web dev.

    Hugo was much simpler when it comes to theming, just git clone a repository (which, I get is not ideal for everyone, but also, isn’t all that different from downloading a theme zip file for something like wordpress). Hugo seemed promising to me, but despite the relative ease of cloning a repo for a theme, I couldn’t get Hugo to generate a single page of content. I read the docs, watched tutorials, got frustrated, kept getting errors, and noped out.

    Grav when I tried it was exactly what I was looking for. Out of the box it has a nice simple theme. I can drop a markdown file into a folder and it automatically generates it. That part is even better than Hugo, 11ty and other ssgs. You don’t have to run a command to generate or edit an html file from a markdown file. It watches the content folder and when it finds new/changed .md files it auto generates them.

    I also really liked that Grav easily did what these other ssgs claim is easy to do (but in my experience failed to deliver on), and provided some additional complexity for making management a little easier via the web ui.

    Overall I like Grav, but I’m not actually using it. I ended up fixing the database permissions on my wordpress container. I’m going to keep Grav around in case I decide to migrate, or if I ever decide to launch another site/project.



  • Thank you (switched to an lemmy.ml account because I haven’t been able to comment or post on lemmy.world for over a week)

    Not really specific skills, I’m just a hands on learner/tinkerer. I’ve been messing with self hosting for around three years now, so spinning up new docker services is fairly easy (fairly. I still have a lot to learn about docker). In doing so, I’ve used and referred to github a lot, and even used git to clone repositories for self hosting a service, but beyond that, I hadn’t looked into it as it didn’t seem relevant to me at the time.

    And thank you for the Forgejo information! I will look into that and compare to see which one I’d like to use. Coincidentally I just saw today or yesterday that Forgejo has gone for a hard fork.