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Hexo vs Middleman: What are the differences?
Hexo: 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; Middleman: A static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development. Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.
Hexo and Middleman 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, Middleman provides the following key features:
- Sass for DRY stylesheets
- CoffeeScript for safer and less verbose javascript
- Multiple asset management solutions, including Sprockets
"Ease of deployment" is the top reason why over 15 developers like Hexo, while over 17 developers mention "Rails for static sites" as the leading cause for choosing Middleman.
Hexo and Middleman are both open source tools. It seems that Hexo with 26.9K GitHub stars and 3.57K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Middleman with 6.48K GitHub stars and 699 GitHub forks.
DigitalOcean, Poll Everywhere, and Virtkick are some of the popular companies that use Middleman, whereas Hexo is used by Hazeorid, Erudika, and Flex.io. Middleman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 32 company stacks & 16 developers stacks; compared to Hexo, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 23 developer stacks.
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 Middleman
- Rails for static sites20
- Erb, haml, slim18
- Live reload17
- Easy setup7
- Emacs org-mode integration by middleman-org3
- Make front-end easy and rock solid again1
