🦉 Hoot
Lots of static site generators exist, but most of them squarely target expert users. They rely on you understanding HTML or Markdown, and usually require you to be comfortable committing to a Git repository.
When we work with non-technical users, however, this becomes impractical; perhaps our users don't understand these technologies, or we don't want to give them access to our repository? At this point, we usually end up reaching for a more complete CMS, such as Wordpress, which has a much more user-friendly interface, but requires much more engineering effort to host and maintain.
Hoot uses Contentful to try to provide a minimal static site generator while maintaining all the user convenience of a more established CMS. By pulling your content model from Contentful, and rendering it with Mustache, we can give our content creators a fully-featured editing platform without having to host anything more than static HTML.
👑 Features
All Types Welcome
Hoot interprets your content according to your content model: there are no restrictions on the content that you can create, or the references between them! As long as you have a Mustache template to match a content type, Hoot will render it. You can even render nested content types according to the parent: render your shop products as full pages or thumbnails without any duplication in your content library!
Authors = Designers
Using Contentful's composable entries approach, authors can create complex content pages out of small, composable units. You design the template for each block, and let your authors plug them together.
Live Development
Make changes to your templates, and see the effects in real time. Hoot can watch your templates for changes, and recompile the relevant entries immediately. This means you can see the effect of every change on all the content you already have.
Easy Deployment
Hoot can run as a GitHub action on a cron job, meaning that your live site is never far behind your author's changes. Need more immediate updates? Hoot can be called from a webhook to rebuild your site the moment a change is published by your authors.
🚧 Development
This is very much a WIP, and I'll be committing to it as I get various pieces ready. Once I have a stable first release, I'll make a more active call for help, but it's definitely a hobby project for now 🙂