---
title:                                  Site generators
tagline:                                open-source tools
description:                            Top open-source site generators

date:                                   2019-05-01 00:00:00
series:
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image:                                  /assets/images/modules/attics/building-blocks-1920x1280-bw.jpg

tags:                                   [ Jekyll, Generators ]
index:                                  [ Jekyll, Top, Open, Source, Static, Site, Generators ]
categories:                             []

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          alt:                          Photo by Ryan Quintal on Unsplash
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People quite often ask, if static websites make sense for anything beyond a
one-page website. Some other see in static websites the stone age of the
World Wide Web. What's about static websites today? What's achiveable?

This article highlights top open source projects, in many different programming
languages. Have a look what's going on the market.

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[[readmore]]
== Static Site Generators

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A typical CMS driven website works by building each and every page dynamically.
That means fetching the content from a database to pass them over to a template
system for adding the required structure information (e.g. CSS styles).
This means each page is assembled on demand.

For many, many websites dynamic page generation is completely unnecessary and
adds unwanted risks in terms of complexity, performance losses and security
issues. After all, the content of most websites changes only, when the content
authors makes changes.

Why a hell should a web page always assembled on demand if there are no
changes?

NOTE: To be fair, most CMS are providing caching systems for web pages to
prevent unnessesary creation processes. It is not easy to implement such
a caching system and in the very end, it adds the next level of complexity.

A Static Site Generator takes a different approach and generate all the pages
of the website upfront. That does not nessesarily mean, that a static website
is always generated from the scratch. Modern generators support a so-called
incremental build; like Jekyll does. When there are changes detected to the
content, only selected pages are rebuild.

This means overall, statically build web pages having no moving parts in the
deployed website. This results in browser-side caching only, the performance
goes up and static sites are far more secure because they are build already.

To find out what Open Source Static Site Generators are available today and
their ranking in terms of popularity go for StaticGen You'll will find the
most complete list of generators!

Check https://www.staticgen.com[StaticGen].

Have fun!