Gridsome VS Bulma

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The web tech stack is actually one of my biggest regrets. It's a static site generator called Gridsome[0] that the maintainers abandoned about three months after I used it to launch the TinyPilot website.

At the time I made the TinyPilot site, I was very excited about Vue, so a Vue-based SSG seemed great. Since then, I've come to find SPAs and most frontend frameworks to be way too much complexity, so I've moved away from Vue, but the TinyPilot website is still stuck on Vue 2.x and bootstrap-vue (which is tied to Vue 2 and Bootstrap 4).

So, it keeps creaking along, but building the 100ish pages on the site takes about five minutes, whereas I think something like Hugo could probably do it in a few seconds. Plus, we get random runtime errors[1] that are pretty hard to debug.

[0] https://gridsome.org/

[1] https://github.com/nuxt/nuxt/issues/5800

Nuxt.js and Gridsome are tailor-made for Vue.js developers.

Gridsome — Jamstack SSG tool for Vue developers

Node is basically back-end Javascript. While powerful alone, almost exclusively you will use a back-end framework like Next.js or Gatsby when using React, and then maybe Nuxt or Gridsome in Vue.

Among other thoughts, I considered a possibility of migration to a newer tech stack (because I can). Don't get me wrong, I actually love Gridsome (which is underneath my website now). But it's quite obsolete, and it's actually a dead project now.

One downside of Gridsome is that development seems to have stopped if you look at their github. For that reason I've recently switched my Gridsome clients to Nuxt

I definitely think Nuxt is worth learning for more than just a static site. However, there is a Gatsby-like Vue framework that focuses on SSG: https://gridsome.org/

Gridsome

All the Static Site Generators have been in the market for many years. With time, they get new improvements and upgrades as well. While considering SSG frameworks, like Gatsby, Nuxt, Gridsome, Next, and many more have been on the developer’s list for a long time. But when we talk about blazing fast web performance as per core web vital, then we have to do a lot of work in the available frameworks, after connecting a lot of dots (in terms of web performance), but still, we cannot achieve the web performance as per our need if we consider a use case of a large website where 20+ components are in one page.

Tailwind is great, but creating everything from scratch is annoying. A nice base of components which can be extended with tailwind would be great. There are a few tailwind frameworks like Flowbite, Daisy Ui, but I like Bulma, PicoCSS and Bootstrap.

I would talk about building the frontend, but it is just a single page React app I built quickly. It does use a CSS library called Bulma, which is similar to tailwind and worth checking out. I did spend a day implementing a login/signup page, but this was just for the learning experience, and not what I wanted in the final product.

After finding a few spare hours I decided to address the alerts and update some my dependencies. I spent several hours debugging my Gatsby site after doing some recommended npm package updates. My UI class library Bulma was not being loaded by my sass-loader module. (I later learned that they migrated to dart-sass so I guess the fix should have been a pretty easy). Nonetheless, this prompted me to rethink my entire static site generator stack and got me curious about some other options. Why have these unnecessarily complex dependency chains? At that point I was almost too hesitant to even touch my package.json file. That's just silly.

Oh wow, quite happy about this, for a while it seemed the project was abandoned, really glad Jeremy keeps working on this :) The new website (https://bulma.io/) also looks very slick. I could totally see that he'd be able to monetize this like Tailwind, it's a really well thought-out framework with a good compromise between responsiveness, utility classes and components.

So, our post.component.html component is the generic page where all posts will have their content loaded. Here, the classes are from the Bulma CSS framework, and the template looks like this:

This is a pretty basic HTML that contains a form with a couple of form fields and a submit button. To make styling a little easier, I opted to use Bulma. But that’s entirely optional, and does nothing to impact our app.

Since v1.9.0 release, the Gowebly CLI includes support for Bootstrap and Bulma CSS frameworks.

Bulma is a lightweight and modern CSS framework that simplifies the styling of your web projects. It offers a clean and intuitive set of classes to structure and design your HTML elements, providing a quick and easy way to create visually appealing layouts. Bulma is responsive and mobile-friendly, making it an excellent choice for developers who want a straightforward and flexible solution for their projects. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced coder, Bulma's simplicity and versatility make it a popular option for building stylish and responsive web interfaces without the need for extensive customization.