Our great sponsors
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eleventy 🕚⚡️
A simpler site generator. Transforms a directory of templates (of varying types) into HTML.
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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
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If you want to make a basic site with without any fancy frameworks, but want to make it easier to reuse content/templates, 11ty will help you solve that problem. If you want to use a web framework of some kind, then there may be a static site generator library/framework built on top. But remember that any front-end framework is in fact a static site by default. So you don't need to do anything fancy if you don't care about your site depending on some JS running before your page loads.
One nice trick you can apply to any site built with any framework is to generate a static preview of every page at build time. Basically take a browser automation tool like puppeteer and load up every one of your pages on localhost. After the page loads, scrape the DOM and write it to an HTML file. That's basically the same process that server-side rendering is doing, but you are doing it at build time to create static files so the users can see your contnet instantly before any JS need to run. But still can take full advantage of your framework since your code will be loading in the background and take over the rendering of the page when it's ready. This doesn't work for sites that have a lot of dynamic content. But if your site is showing the same information to every user both today and a month from now, then you can totally generate that page once and serve it to everyone!