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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Static Site Generators
  5. Metalsmith vs Octopress

Metalsmith vs Octopress

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Octopress
Octopress
Stacks45
Followers48
Votes0
GitHub Stars9.3K
Forks2.6K
Metalsmith
Metalsmith
Stacks53
Followers66
Votes19

Metalsmith vs Octopress: What are the differences?

What is Metalsmith? 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.

What is Octopress? A static blogging framework for hackers, based on Jekyll. Octopress is an obsessively designed framework for Jekyll blogging. It’s easy to configure and easy to deploy.

Metalsmith and Octopress belong to "Static Site Generators" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Metalsmith are:

  • Read template files from a directory
  • Parse files for template placeholders
  • Prompt user to fill in each placeholder

On the other hand, Octopress provides the following key features:

  • Octopress sports a clean responsive theme written in semantic HTML5, focused on readability and friendliness toward mobile devices.
  • Code blogging is easy and beautiful. Embed code (with Solarized styling) in your posts from gists, jsFiddle or from your filesystem.
  • Third party integration is simple with built-in support for Pinboard, Delicious, GitHub Repositories, Disqus Comments and Google Analytics.

Metalsmith and Octopress are both open source tools. Octopress with 9.51K GitHub stars and 2.86K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Metalsmith with 7.27K GitHub stars and 640 GitHub forks.

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Detailed Comparison

Octopress
Octopress
Metalsmith
Metalsmith

Octopress is an obsessively designed framework for Jekyll blogging. It’s easy to configure and easy to deploy.

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.

Octopress sports a clean responsive theme written in semantic HTML5, focused on readability and friendliness toward mobile devices.;Code blogging is easy and beautiful. Embed code (with Solarized styling) in your posts from gists, jsFiddle or from your filesystem.;Third party integration is simple with built-in support for Pinboard, Delicious, GitHub Repositories, Disqus Comments and Google Analytics.;It's easy to use. A collection of rake tasks simplifies development and makes deploying a cinch.;Ships with great plug-ins some original and others from the Jekyll community — tested and improved.
Read template files from a directory;Parse files for template placeholders;Prompt user to fill in each placeholder;Render files with aytemplating engine;Write filled-in files to a new directory
Statistics
GitHub Stars
9.3K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
2.6K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
45
Stacks
53
Followers
48
Followers
66
Votes
0
Votes
19
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 9
    Plugability
  • 4
    Easy to install, easy to hack, easy to deploy
  • 2
    Really works hard to be simple
  • 1
    Chain plugins like a file processing pipe
  • 1
    CI: push to github, auto-deploy to netlifly (free)

What are some alternatives to Octopress, Metalsmith?

Jekyll

Jekyll

Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories.

Hugo

Hugo

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data.

Gatsby

Gatsby

Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future.

Hexo

Hexo

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.

Middleman

Middleman

Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.

Gridsome

Gridsome

Build websites using latest web tech tools that developers love - Vue.js, GraphQL and Webpack. Get hot-reloading and all the power of Node.js. Gridsome makes building websites fun again.

Pelican

Pelican

Pelican is a static site generator that supports Markdown and reST syntax. Write your weblog entries directly with your editor of choice (vim!) in reStructuredText or Markdown.

DocPad

DocPad

Empower your website frontends with layouts, meta-data, pre-processors (markdown, jade, coffeescript, etc.), partials, skeletons, file watching, querying, and an amazing plugin system. DocPad will streamline your web development process allowing you to craft full-featured websites quicker than ever before.

11ty

11ty

A simpler static site generator. An alternative to Jekyll. Written in JavaScript. Transforms a directory of templates (of varying types) into HTML. Works with HTML, Markdown, Liquid, Nunjucks, Handlebars, Mustache, EJS, Haml, Pug, and JavaScript Template Literals.

MkDocs

MkDocs

It builds completely static HTML sites that you can host on GitHub pages, Amazon S3, or anywhere else you choose. There's a stack of good looking themes available. The built-in dev-server allows you to preview your documentation as you're writing it. It will even auto-reload and refresh your browser whenever you save your changes.

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