mdBook VS gutenberg

I'm responsible for a number of Java products. I try to provide high-quality Javadoc for all public library interfaces, library user's guides where appropriate, and development guides for applications. The latter two take the form of MDBook documents (https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/), with the document source living in the GitHub repo so that it's tied to the particular software release in a natural way.

My org has used mdBook: https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/ (That link is itself a rendered mdBook, so that'll give you an idea of the feature set.)

(While it's definitely a Rust "thing", if you just have a set of .md files, all you need is a "SUMMARY.md" (which contains the ToC) and a small config file; i.e., you don't have to have any Rust code to use it, and it works fine without. We document a large, mostly non-Rust codebase with it.)

If you want the lowest friction, open source, easily extensible Markdown to Web, Kindle, PDF, etc. tool, highly recommend mdBook: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook it’s written in Rust, but you don’t have to know any Rust to use it. And then wing is all CSS; for which there are many good (free) themes.

Interesting enough there seems to be an open PR for that: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/pull/1918

If you are interested to draw something I also suggest you to use mdbook

So after shopping around a bit I found a simple, dependency-less static site generator called Zola. The lack of dependencies sounded very attractive after all the headaches trying to update my Gatsby modules. I wanted to give Zola a try and see what tradeoffs I would need to make coming form a React-based framework to this Rust-based generator.

I think you're thinking about Zola: https://github.com/getzola/zola

But yes, if I were to recommend something, it'd be Zola given that there's just one executable that you need to run and there's absolutely no setup required.

If I were to start again from scratch, I'd likely use Zola as SSG (https://www.getzola.org/)

I'm currently learning https://www.getzola.org/.

It's more manual than idy like but it's gonna be for a small personal and work website so I don't mind much.

It's super fast.

Doesn't seem to fit your use casr but still.

Honestly, frontend development especially with all these crowded frameworks and libraries always confused me so pardon my ignorance, which is why in a project I’m working on right now I’m trying not to use js, instead I’m using egui [1]

Zola is a static site generator and it’s crazy fast, using one binary only [2], also there’s Blades [3], same concept but supposedly faster, never tried it though.

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

[2] https://www.getzola.org

[3] https://getblades.org

Great project. But honestly, I reached to the point of “less JS” or even no js is better for developers and also users. I’m currently migrating my old blog to a new one that gets generated by Zola [1], and even my main portfolio site, which funnily enough I newly made it with React/Gatsby, but I’m redoing it again with Zola because of the performance gap is just unmatched, not to mention I personally sometimes browse the web with js disabled so if a website is completely non-functional or doesn’t even load because of that is a deal breaker. My old site years ago used to use jquery and I was annoyed by it to some degree, trying react and the likes was a nightmare!

[1] https://www.getzola.org

Zola (https://www.getzola.org/) can generate from markdown-ish files nice looking documentation websites (and also RSS feeds), it uses syntect (https://github.com/trishume/syntect) which supports sublime syntax highlight files. For github readme I don't have a solution besides using a png.

The htmx website has been migrated from 11ty to zola by @danieljsummers, cutting way down on the number of “development” javascript dependencies