I love static site generators, especially Hugo, but I also need a way for non-technical editors to create content.
I wanted to post a long comment of a plan how the best aspects of static site generators and file-based CMS could be combined. Unfortunately, the forum doesn’t trust me enough to add more than two links and images… So, I extended it a bit and created a blog post on my website, instead:
Making Content Editors and Web Developers Happy Again
I would really love your opinion on this. I mention Hugo as my tool of choice but have a few wished for Hugo (that are on the roadmap anyways). See the section about My Wishlist for Hugo in the article above. Here is a summary:
Allow content with non-MD extensions: I describe a way to use complex content that has multiple Markdown sections per file (with TOML). This is already possible with Hugo. But, the .md
extension doesn’t really make sense if the content file only contains TOML. When issue #147 will be fixed, Non-MD files will be accepted in the content folder. We would need to make sure that the .toml
files would also be processed like .md
files.
Assets in the content directory: I’m desperately waiting for Issue #147 to be fixed. This would allow us to place content like images next to the MD/TOML
file. I would love to have a subfolder for each page that bundles all assets for a page together! This would greatly simplify things for a Static CMS.
Dynamic image resizing: Ideally, the content editor would not need to worry about the image sizes but would just upload it to the content folder. Hugo would then pick up the image and resize it, based on the size defined in the template. We would need to figure out a good place for the resized images to be stored so that they don’t need to be recreated every time.
Web-Based CMS: An interactive web-based editor for Hugo is already beeing discussed and is on the Hugo Roadmap. I don’t know, however, if it is such a good idea to include this in Hugo. I think it would be better to keep the CMS and website generation separate.
We’re not that far away from an awesome way to build websites, IMO. The biggest part will be to create or adapt a File-Based CMS. I think that Hugo should continue to be awesome at it’s core task: generating static websites. There are only two features needed in Hugo: Allowing .toml
instead of .md
files for content (which is more of a cosmetic thing) and better image/asset handling.
What do you think?