MkDocs

Can a static site generator (SSG) be more accessible than a content management system (CMS) to someone without Web development experience? And should we use an SSG instead of setting up something like WordPress? For those who don’t know, a static site generator is essentially a program that compiles a directory of text/Markdown files into a Web site that can be hosted on any Web server. Its core function is to convert Markdown to HTML.

As you can tell, this site is no longer based on Publii CMS (which is still a very good CMS). After spending a few hours with MkDocs, I’ve been tempted to use that instead, as I can do pretty much everything using Vim. I’m still migrating the content, so this site is a work in progress. Using a static site generator might initially seem like a long-assed way of getting a basic site up, but once MkDocs is installed and running, and the site’s customised, we only need to worry about a single configuration file and where to place the content.