Pelican VS Metalsmith

In my experience, [Pelican](https://getpelican.com/) does a good job of allowing you to edit themes on all pages at once with its static page generator.

There are a lot of built in features designed more for blog-like websites, but I’ve found it pretty easy to make my personal website with it.

Pelican is a preferred option for Python developers.

There's also Pelican but I haven't used it and seeing as Github serves static pages I'd imagine it builds and deploys your page and is done with it.

I use Pelican (https://getpelican.com/) for my blog, which works decently for me. It is a static site generator written in Python.

But you probably won't learn much Python by using it (or Rust when using a generator written in it) since you probably won't need to change anything in it.

Surely a "local private wiki ... not web based ... on a desktop application" is not really a "wiki" at all, but rather a "static site generator" with a built-in "search". If that's what you want, there's a Python app called Pelican. Writing such an app from scratch isn't really a beginners project.

Pelican — best for Python developers

You can - you'd basically just create a python script that parses your HTML/CSS files and replaces strings with values from your YAML. However I wouldn't recommend that unless you're just using this as an opportunity to learn Python. If you want to standup a real site and you want to use python, I'd recommend a Python static site generator like Pelican or Nikola.

As you're familiar with Python, how about https://getpelican.com?

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/