I’ve made the switch from Hugo to Zola mostly because I had come to dread making substantial changes to this site. Go’s template language is too weird and the way I implemented Tailwind is too fragile. Zola and plain old CSS have cleared all that up.
Zola is a Static Site Generator very similar to Hugo. In fact, its author, Vincent Prouillet, created Zola partially because he hated the Go Template language but liked Hugo. Since I’m in the same boat, I had to give Zola a try and I’m generally pretty happy with it.
If you’re looking for a SSG (Static Site Generator) to create a website, it pretty much comes down to Hugo or 11ty (Eleventy). The rest of the SSGs are either too old, poorly supported, or meant for creating web apps. I’ve tried quite a few of them, I found that I kept coming back to Hugo and 11ty.
While experimenting with various static site generators, I’ve also been learning about Bulma (a traditional CSS framework) and TailwindCSS (a utility-based CSS framework). They come at the idea of a CSS framework from two very different directions, and if you’ve seen the Internet discussions, you’ll know that opinions are decidedly mixed.