With rapid web technologies development static sites are now considered boring, when in reality they have a number of advantages over the dynamic ones, depending on the type of website you would like to implement:
- Static sites use little server resources, since there are no database requests and static HTML pages can immediately be served by the web server;
- Better security, since static sites do not contain portions provided dynamically and no software to upgrade;
- Quick access, because there is no database on the server and no code is being executed when the page is requested;
- You can avoid vendor and platform dependency.
All of this makes the static website much easier to maintain. The tools that help to create a static website are called static site generators. Their main function is to transform input (text written in markup languages) into static HTML, applying templates and filters. One of the most popular and efficient generators is Nikola.
Nikola - Static Site and Blog Generator
Nikola is a static site and blog generator based on Python. Usually input is presented in form of text in lightweight markup languages, such as Markdown, reStructuredText, Wiki, BBCode, Textile, AsciiDoc, IPython Notebooks, Misaka, Pandoc, txt2tags, and HTML.
Nikola features:
- blogs, with tags, RSS feeds, archives, comments, etc.
- easy page template customization;
- plugins for custom site search;
- Google sitemap generation;
- page galleries/slideshows;
- support for displaying source code;
- webassets can be merged in a single file using the CSS and JavaScript files;
- server-side optimization by compressing files with gzip;
- "live" re-rendering during editing.
Nikola consists of small codebase that is compatible with Python 2 and 3 and thus is easy to maintain and extend with minimal Python knowledge. Nikola can apply themes. Currently there are three different themes that further can be a base for customization. Moreover, Nikola has internationalization support for over 10 languages. Nikola provides a smooth review and deployment process.
Interested in more?
Nikola is built on Python, thus flexible and extendable. In general, static site generators are an appealing solution for web projects and there is a wide range of tools to choose from. Contact Quintagroup to receive efficient web development solution.