Static site generator that works like GitHub with blog features?

Question

I'm looking for a static site generator that works like GitHub and has basic blogging features. What I mean by 'works like GitHub' is mostly how Markdown gets rendered and relative links between Markdown files work. https://github.com/blog/1395-relative-links-in-markup-files

I do not want to use Jekyll. I don't like its philosophy of every post filename must start with a date. Why not pull the date from the file metadata or front matter?

Middleman is better since it doesn't have that requirement but out of the box it doesn't rewrite .md relative links to .html like GitHub does.

Any recommendations?

Answer 1

You can look on DocPad.

It offers many possibilities, has nice documentation and is based on Node.js

It supports many markup plugins (markdown, textile, ...). With DocPad you can create complex static blog with advanced features (like non-static functionalities, database querying,

importing pages from external:

• database (MongoDB, MySQL, ...)
• services (Tumblr, Dropbox, GitHub, etc.)

Import data from external services (Atom, XML, JSON, etc.)

You can use DocPad with GitHub. You can write into repository to house your wiki content, have DocPad render it, and automatically update on changes. Here is more info.

What do you mean by "basic blogging features"? In my opinion they can be following:

• easy writing new posts (for example in markdown syntax)
• possibility for adding comments to your blog posts - it can be done with external service like Disqus.
• adding tags to posts, filtering posts by tags

If you are familiar with programming (javascript, Node.js) DocPad can be one of the best choice.

Answer 2

Nikola is a static web site generator written in python with the following features:

• Incremental Builds for speed
• Out of the box, supports Markdown, reStructuredText (default), IPython (Jupyter) Notebooks and HTML.
• blogs (with comments, tags, categories, archives, RSS/Atom feeds),
• multilingual support,
• easy image galleries,
• and code listings
• Themes (Mako or jinja2)
• Plugins in python
• Stores things like the blog post date as metadata either inside the file or in a separate file.
• Free, gratis & open source, MIT licence.

Answer 3

I don't know if this is quite what you mean, but one option might be Kirby is a file-based CMS that doesn't require a SQL database or the like. Content is written in Markdown and the whole thing is highly configurable. I use it for my own website because I wanted something that was simpler than WordPress etc.