I used the Hugo templating framework to build this site, and will list some of the pros/cons that I noticed.
Hugo originally got my attention on HN, through various projects builing landing pages with the framework. Kubernetes also migrated their docs to Hugo recently, citing scaling issues with Jekyll. I was considering using Next.js to make a markdown/jsx-based site, but Hugo was both less complex and more easily scalable than a minimalist node or React website.
Pros:
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Speed. The Go compiler with hot-reload are built-in and extrememly nice, and give a static folder that is easy to deploy.
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Themes. Community-built themes take away the need to spend days configuring custom css. I built the generic site in about 5 hours, which is mostly because now I don’t have to spend a week tweaking the css to deviate satisfactorly from the bootstrap generics.
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Opinionated: The framework has expected ways to structure your project and organize your articles. I am personally not interested in spending a long time trying to think about the optimal way to modularize and structure a blog website. The writers of Hugo were interested in that, and they spent several years optimizing that, and I’d rather not try to reinvent the wheel.
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Flexible: Hugo has mechanisms to let you customize markdown files with html to the extent that it’s possible.
Cons:
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Docs. The written and video tutorials try to be helpful, but are lacking. It’s a new framework, and it seems like the expected user has to have a strong grasp of front-end development for Hugo to seem approachable. Stackoverflow and their in-house forums weren’t terrbily helpful.
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Flexible: Markdown rarely needs special-use code, so the overhead of learning how to use the templating, parameter binding, and shortcoding is sort of a downside of Hugo. I think if the docs were better (maybe it’s just me) it would be a much clearer upside.
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Templating language: I personally don’t like the templating syntax style. It’s kind of like Jinja. I think there are alternatives, but if you want to stick close to the docs you have to use the default.
Overall:
I hope that Hugo will gain traction and be able to mature as a framework. The logic behind the article structuring is there, but I think the docs could do a better job of explaining more thoroughly how to implement advanced features.
Moving forward I might rely more on trying to look at existing projects to see how they structure themselves. There’s a limit to how complex a blogging website can be, and I think it will be worth my time to try to learn one framework extremely well to save myself startup costs in the future.