Investigate alternatives to the current static generation toolkit

[ralf57]

In order to speed up on-boarding of new contributors, we need to evaluate the usage of more established tool/static generator.

Hints:

• https://vuepress.vuejs.org/
• https://www.staticgen.com/
• https://getkirby.com/ (requires web server and PHP 7.1)

[renestalder]

Side note: Keep track of #198. If this works out, possibly this ticket needs to re-target to work with the Netlify CMS.

[ingvoo]

Started a branch here if anyone would like to have a look:
https://github.com/Access4all/adg/tree/feature/poc-vuepress

yarn install 
yarn dev

Having some issues with handling nested pages but can be solved by extending the sidebar template or creating a custom theme.

[renestalder]

I checked your branch and installed everything. Looks very promising to me and I would love to see the navigation extended to the point, the current guide could be fully explored in VuePress. I guess form that point on, we have a good foundation for deciding if this is worth switching.

Would you mind putting efforts in trying to make the navigation fully work with the sub pages? Otherwise, I can take over.

[ingvoo]

Thanks @renestalder.
I see the navigation as the biggest blocker here as well. I think before moving forward with this it would be good to consider if we want to keep the same navigation pattern as how it exists today or not. Basically if we should customize the PoC to match the current navigation pattern or if there is an alternative that is also fine.

Another blocker is the search (algolia). It currently only indexes the titles of the pages/posts. But it would be great to have it also working for page content. You can also look into that if you are interested.

Feel free to move forward as I will have little as no time before easter.

[ralf57]

@ingvijonasson for the search, I think we should keep using the current https://www.sitesearch360.com/ service instead of switching to Algolia so no worry about that.

[ralf57]

It's worth having a look at https://gridsome.org/ and https://gridsome.org/plugins/@gridsome/source-filesystem

[renestalder]

I thought about this today when I started implementing the POC for Netlify CMS. I would like to give Eleventy (11ty) a try here as it worked great in the past and there are now a couple of more case studies of much bigger content "wikis" which were migrated to Eleventy. The additional benefit is that we can keep the current templates; everything can be kept framework agnostic.

[ralf57]

@renestalder I've played a bit with Netlify CMS and, honestly, I have not been impressed that much.
So looking forward to the outcome of your Eleventy test.

[renestalder]

@renestalder I've played a bit with Netlify CMS and, honestly, I have not been impressed that much.
So looking forward to the outcome of your Eleventy test.

It's by far not the most user-friendly interface but I believe it's still better having sort of an online editor than not having one at all.

An alternative would also be Kirby CMS which I use in the same fashion as the Netlify CMS.

[ralf57]

@renestalder are you using https://getkirby.com/plugins/d4l-data4life/static-site-generator with Kirby?

[renestalder]

@ralf57 Nah, I went with Eleventy for quite everything lately, and for Kirby I'm using the Kirby Query Language to hook it up to Eleventy. Then there is a webhook plugin for Kirby which I use to send a signal to GitLab on page creation/change/delete and regenerate the website and deploy it automatically. Quite a process. But my main goal was always separation of concerns between front-end, content and content-management/back-end. For the sake of getting the speed of static sites and hosting on a CDN, I'm pretty sure the plugin would do the job. But the front-end will be tied to Kirby (you would need to leverage the templating system of Kirby).

[ralf57]

FYI: I've resumed this ticket and currently investigating modern alternatives to the tools mentioned above.

[ralf57]

I have a running local POC with content migrated from our current application to https://www.11ty.dev/
A lot is still missing but it looks promising. Keeping you updated.