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Hexo vs Wintersmith: What are the differences?
Developers describe Hexo as "A fast, simple & powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js". Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework. It parses your posts with Markdown or other render engine and generates static files with the beautiful theme. All of these just take seconds. On the other hand, Wintersmith is detailed as "Flexible, minimalistic, multi-platform static site generator built on top of node.js". Wintersmith is a simple yet flexible static site generator. It takes contents (markdown, less, scripts, etc), transforms them using plugins and outputs a static website (html, css, images, etc) that you can host anywhere.
Hexo and Wintersmith belong to "Static Site Generators" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Hexo are:
- Blazing Fast - Node.js brings you incredible generating speed. Hundreds of files take only seconds to build.
- Markdown Support - All features of GitHub Flavored Markdown are supported. You can even use most Octopress plugins in Hexo.
- One-Command Deployment - You only need one command to deploy your site to GitHub Pages, Heroku or other sites.
On the other hand, Wintersmith provides the following key features:
- Flexible - Wintersmith tries not to put any limitations on how you work with your content. You can transform it using plugins and structure it as you please.
- Templating - Use your favorite templating engine, it comes bundled with a Jade plugin and there is community made plugins for most other node.js templating engines.
- Markdown - No more fiddling around with WYSIWYG editors. Once you start using Markdown to author your content you'll never look back!
Hexo and Wintersmith are both open source tools. It seems that Hexo with 27.1K GitHub stars and 3.6K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Wintersmith with 3.48K GitHub stars and 349 GitHub forks.
I have been building a website with Gatsby (for a small group of volunteers). I track it in GitHub and push it to Amazon S3.
I am satisfied with it as a single user; however, I would like to get non-technical teammates to be able to post Markdown blog posts. I tried to teach them to add mdx files, git push, gastby build, and publish with gatsby-plugin-s3, but I am getting a fair amount of resistance :).
So I wonder if there are tools, preferably using Node.js, that allow multi-user blog authors a la wordpress, i.e. with an interface for non technical bloggers, but producing static/pre-rendered web pages.
(PS: I am considering having a node/express.js server where they could upload their mdx file and the server would re-build push and publish for them, without having them install anything, but I'd like to know if something already exists before jumping into this endeavor)
If you're after Markdown I would look at https://www.netlifycms.org. I've used it on several projects to allow clients to use Markdown to publish and it integrates really well with Gatsby. You can create your own content structures using it then implement them into your templates. These are all the widgets you can use: https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/widgets/
This keeps it strictly static file driven with no database or need for express etc.
Pros of Hexo
- Ease of deployment18
- Uses NodeJS and npm13
- Easy GitHub Pages publishing12
- Powerful templating10
- Useful tools and plugins7
- Easy intergrating with js4
- Open source3
- Blazing Fast3
Pros of Wintersmith
- Easy setup1
