I know this discussion has been had many times before but I'm curious about opinions on zola? I was thinking about trying to mix in some htmx for some light interactivity.
Recently setup zola for hosting recipes and other info within my home. I found it overall ok, but there were some quirks that made it a little difficult.
I enjoyed that you can build your own shortcode elements, so for my page I wrote a little script to scan for baking ingredient quantites and shows a widget to rescale the whole recipe. I can just type out regular recipes as markdown, without special tags other than wrapping in the shortcode.
Finding an existing template that is complete and easy to integrate took enough time that I just made my own outline and snazzed it up with a classless css framework (Sakura), though there are a couple blogs that dig down into which supports what features. Templating itself is fairly easy though the tutorial is a little convoluted.
Figuring out which variables were available for a specific context/page wasn't straightforward or seemingly consistent.
My biggest irritation though was that taxonomies have to be manually hardcoded at the top of each markup page, rather than naturally tagging within the document. And they need a specific template already existing to even build (it will error if everything doesn't match exactly)
I should note that Zola seems to be designed specifically for documentation, so trying to shoehorn it to other uses could be part of the friction I felt.
Helpful! Would you use it for future projects or recommend any others? I think I might give it a try regardless. I'm not crazy about installing millions of node dependencies like with most other frameworks.
Yes, I would use it again, in part because I have some experience with it now. But you should give it a try, its fairly easy to get a basic structure built.
I haven't tried many other SSGs, but my tolerance for unnecessary pain is low, so I skipped quickly on some of the other popular options.
I think it would really depend on end use, as like I said it seems to have been designed for creating project documentation primarily, which could be limiting if you want to get crazy. And its written in Rust, if you want to modify anything.
Another plus for me is that it's available as an OpenBSD package/binary ready to run. I can't recall how much was installed as depency though. Have fun!
