Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Hexo vs Metalsmith: 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, Metalsmith is detailed as "An extremely simple, pluggable static site generator". In Metalsmith, all of the logic is handled by plugins. You simply chain them together. Since everything is a plugin, the core library is actually just an abstraction for manipulating a directory of files.
Hexo and Metalsmith can be primarily classified as "Static Site Generators" tools.
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, Metalsmith provides the following key features:
- Read template files from a directory
- Parse files for template placeholders
- Prompt user to fill in each placeholder
"Ease of deployment" is the top reason why over 15 developers like Hexo, while over 8 developers mention "Plugability" as the leading cause for choosing Metalsmith.
Hexo and Metalsmith are both open source tools. Hexo with 26.9K GitHub stars and 3.57K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Metalsmith with 7.26K GitHub stars and 641 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 Metalsmith
- Plugability9
- Easy to install, easy to hack, easy to deploy4
- Really works hard to be simple2
- Chain plugins like a file processing pipe1
- CI: push to github, auto-deploy to netlifly (free)1
- Build any kind of website1
- Use any templating engine1
