Let me sum it up for you: it is yet website generator that allows you to spend an entire weekend making something that almost works while reading reams of boring documentation.
The next weekend you will already have forgotten how to work it and you think "fuck it" and either install Jekyll (which is also a piece of shit, but it is a piece of shit that has a bigger community) or you think "screw this" and sign up for some website generation service your slightly odd uncle uses.
Wake me up when someone makes a website generator for people who really aren't interested in website generators.
That would be me. I found Hugo and Jekyll because I wanted a simple but powerful way to build websites.
After using Drupal and Wordpress for years they're a total breath of fresh air.
I can put together a site in a fraction of the time it would normally take, host it for free, and through services like Snipcart, Typeform and Forestry.io, add some surprisingly sophisticated functionality.
Why not make it as a command line program that requires only the barest minimum of depedencies? And be bold: make strong conventions so that the source structure is as identical as possible for each site -- so people can build on your project and provide tooling for it.
1. Someone who knows the benefits of a self-hosted static site over say wordpress.com/.org. So probably some technical.
2. But doesn't want to learn another command line app, a new templating system etc. Just wants to write stuff and publish it in an intuitive way. They don't want to shave that Yak to write their blog. Hell they are so damn lazy they don't want to download and install anything! (hence a chrome app)
I currently solve this using Github pages, letting it generate the site for me so no local install. But that feels a bit locked in.
Yes, Hugo tries to be that, but it doesn't succeed in offering enough good conventions, so if you want to use one of the many setups available things are going to get messy.
Making something a website generator isn't easy. Not least because people who design and implement these things seem to love fiddling around with website generator tools. Which isn't necessarily what users like.
What happens is that someone gets as angsty about it as you just displayed, but decides to do something about it, and starts a website generation service.
There's still a need to solve the basic problem: a command line site generation tool. Preferably one that doesn't try to solve everything else in the process and ends up being a poor something else. Build something that does one job well and design it with the intent that other people can build on it.
For instance so someone can use it to build a website generation service. (Yeah, you kinda do have to solve the basic problem of generating the HTML anyway, so one might as well focus on doing the core part of it well)
I'm not saying it is easy. In fact, it is hard because people tend to get too familiar with their own mess. Or they think it is easy.
(And no, that wasn't angst. That was realism conveyed in a honest manner)
Maybe a bit over the top, but you definitively said it like it is. This stuff can get us all pumped up here on hacker news, but good luck doing this for clients who want simple websites "i can update myself".
Which in 2016 is like 90% of clients.
Therefore, the one and only piece of software everybody here loves to despise: wordpress.
The next weekend you will already have forgotten how to work it and you think "fuck it" and either install Jekyll (which is also a piece of shit, but it is a piece of shit that has a bigger community) or you think "screw this" and sign up for some website generation service your slightly odd uncle uses.
Wake me up when someone makes a website generator for people who really aren't interested in website generators.