I have been using OctoPress since a while. Octopress uses ruby and doesn’t work quite well for 1000s of posts (or so the claim goes).
I wanted to try out Hugo because of the hype of great software and fastness of generation of the static site.
Related: Why I like Go?.
Why change?
Change is the only constant
Change of thinking helps you learn and discover new things
Change is what helps the world move forward
Though change is good term to philophise, its hard to embrace change in life.
Community
There is great community for Hugo. All the code is opensource and there are 10s of themes and 100s of open source repositories to refer code from.
If you are planning to start a static website like a website or a Blog, I’d highly recommend Hugo.
- Documentation
- Discussion Forum (Warning: not a Slack group)
Personal Achievements with Hugo
- I made a website using Hugo in less than 30 minutes. The complete setup till https took about 90-120 minutes
- Starting off with Hugo (in the week of Oct 29, 2016), I made a small website with pages and posts along with product pages (without a cart/checkout). This is time I invested in learning Hugo. Took about a week to get this along with improving my CSS3 skills as well understanding the documentation has a great detail. I also started helping others on the Forum
What I feel it lacks?
Jekyll and Octopress have decent ruby code and software like Middleman which is looked as an alternative to Hugo, can do lot of things like extending and writing Ruby code which is possible since Ruby is an interpreted language.
Since Go is a compiled language, you are limited to the front end code although changing the source code is always an option. I wanted to generate new product pages based on ‘Data’ attribute which is not a feature. This is useful more as a template since the philosophy is to translate files into viewable HTML files.