Switching from Hugo to Zola

General

Today I switched the blogs page from Hugo to Zola .

While Hugo was a great experience, I always thought that it might be very over the top of what I want to do. This is not some kind of simple content management system for me, but I also plan to fiddle around a little bit with the static site internet, especially HTML and CSS.

So the benefits to Hugo I see are:

  • Due to my job I’m familiar with the great Tera templating engine.
  • Zola is written in Rust 🦀! It’s probably not that I would ever need to make changes, but if so, it would be much easier for me to contribute.
  • Simplicity. Hugo is great. But hugo is also just large. Zend isn’t.

ToDo

This is a living document, so you can read my todo list here:

  • About Page
  • Blog Pages
  • GitLab Integration (yes, this page is hosted on GitLab Pages )
  • Taxonomies
  • Top Navigation
  • Basic CSS
  • RSS feeds
  • Extra: Dark mode (this was much easier than I thought!)

Summary

A few hours later and I’m done. It’s basically crazy how few steps I needed to move my personal homepage from Hugo to Zola. The basic steps I took today:

  • Save content/ folder, delete all hugo files.
  • Install and init a zola project.
  • Realize that basically everything except tags work. Great 😮!
    • this might be due to the fact that I used basically no hugo features. If you have bigger and more extensive sites, this might be much more difficult for you!
  • try out some templates and realize I don’t like them.
  • Read the great documentation about templates.
  • spend a few hours writing a basic setup

What should I say? I’m pretty happy. While I was developing the template, I tried to read a lot about how to write a simplistic website and ended up with a great website about brutalist web design . While I did not implement all points yet, I like how fast you can go forward if you apply simple principles and keep the complexity of your projects small.