docsify VS Metalsmith

Docsify is frequently updated; the latest release was on June 24, 2023, and the most recent update was on December 17, 2023. It is MIT-licensed and has an active Discord community.

okay new plan, does anyone know how to do this docsify on github? i obviously am a noob on github and recently on reddit. I'd like to help where i can but my knowlegde seems to be my handycap. i could provide you a trash-mail, if you need one, but i need a PO (product owner) to manage the git... i have no clue about this yet (pages and functions and stuff)

The tools to author it aren't that important, frankly. Ask your audience what they're most comfortable using and try to meet them there.

If the stakeholders are technical, you have more options. If they aren't, I hope you like Google Docs or Word, because if you give them anything other than that or a PDF, they'll probably complain. At worst, yeah, write it in a long Markdown text file and use tools like pandoc to transform that into other formats as needed.

If you do need a website and you're not generating enterprise-scale amounts of content (and it sounds like you're not) try things that let you avoid needing build steps and infrastructure if at all possible, so you can iterate and deploy changes with as little friction as you can.

Tools like Docsify[1] can take a pile of Markdown files and serve a site out of them, client- or server-side, without a static build step. Depending on the org, you can get away with GitHub's default rendering of Markdown in a repo. Most static site builds for stuff your scale are overengineered instances of premature optimization.

Past those initial hurdles, the format and tools challenges are all in maintenance. How can you:

- most easily keep the content up to date

- delegate updates as the staff grows or changes

- proactively distribute updates ASAP to the people who'd most benefit from receiving them

That's going to depend a lot more on who'll contribute updates, what their technical proficiency's like, and how they prefer to communicate. It might be a shared git repo and RSS or Slack notifications if they're comfortable with those things, and it might be a Google Doc and email if they're like most non-technical stakeholders.

1: https://docsify.js.org

Big fan of https://docsify.js.org since theres no need to compile your static site. A small amount of js just renders markdown.

If you are searching for examples of an arbitrary Jellyfin support site, visit https://travisflix.com/help/#/support (or help.travisflix.com which redirects to the /help/ URI of the TLD) to take a look at what I have done with docsify on Github Pages.

*Leantime - Competitor to OP? Updated recently, uses Docsify, no demo :(

There are a lot of open-source projects that can help businesses to save time and money. For example, we created a Free Admin panel a few months ago https://github.com/altence/lightence-admin That's an example of free documentation generator https://github.com/docsifyjs/docsify There are a lot more examples. And I want to find an idea of some similar generic solutions that can help various types of businesses

Metalsmith — the best customizable SSG

I use Metalsmith. Been happy with it. I build my site into a self-contained nginx docker image.

const Metalsmith = require('metalsmith') const markdown = require('@metalsmith/markdown') const layouts = require('metalsmith-layouts') const permalinks = require('@metalsmith/permalinks') const collections = require('metalsmith-collections') Metalsmith(__dirname) .metadata({ sitename: 'Website Name', description: "Website description.", generator: 'Metalsmith', url: 'https://metalsmith.io/' }) .source('./src') .destination('./build') // .clean(true) .use( collections({ projects: 'pages/*.md', reverse: true, refer: true }) ) .use(markdown()) .use(permalinks()) .use( layouts({ engineOptions: { helpers: { formattedDate: function (date) { return new Date(date).toLocaleDateString() } } } }) ) .build(function (err, files) { if (err) throw err })

I also started to move to hugo, but they didn't merge the pr [2] which would have helped in the transition. :(

The look is still similar to what it was in the beginning, in terms of colors at least.

[1] https://github.com/metalsmith/metalsmith

Metalsmith

A static site generator I've been enjoying lately (and using for my blog) is Metalsmith: https://metalsmith.io/

It feel like it's the best of both worlds, because it's simple to learn and customize, but there are plugins for the things you don't want to spend time writing yourself.

For example, I'm using plugins to: check for broken links, generate an RSS feed, and run a test server with automatic reloading.

But then I was able to easily add in my own code to handle relative links, generate Graphviz diagrams, and format dates.

One other recommendation: I hated almost every template language I ran across (Hugo's, Liquid, Nunjucks, EJS), but I'm thrilled with the simplicity of Handlebars (https://handlebarsjs.com/), although it is a bit limiting and the "block helper with parameters" syntax is strange (perhaps an indicator that I'm trying to do too much in the templating language!).

I believe Metalsmith [1] is trying that approach

[1] https://metalsmith.io/