Gutenberg is a powerful static site engine inspired by Hugo but simpler to use. You can build pretty much any kind of static site with it using markdown:

• a basic blog
• a landing site
• a knowledge base
• a gitbook
• a documentation site
• all of the above combined

You can download built binaries from the Github releases page. If you were using Gutenberg through Cargo, I will not upload new versions to crates.io for three reasons:

• package for binary crates don't use the Cargo.lock which means a dependency having breaking changes without respecting SemVer will cause the crate to compile but fail at runtime in some cases
• I moved to using a Cargo workspace with many small crates to improve iteration speed
• with Sass, building Gutenberg has become more involved and it is easier to let user install the already built binary

As mentioned in my article introducing Gutenberg, my main issue with Hugo is the extremely poor — and I'm being kind here — template engine it is using. This was solved in the first release of Gutenberg by using a template engine similar to Jinja2 I wrote: Tera.

Another annoying thing was that, since I was using Sass to write CSS, each static site had to set up Sass compilation, usually with node/yarn/gulp.

With Gutenberg 0.1.0, this is solved as it ships with a static version of libsass, the C++ Sass compiler and allows commits like this one.

Let's have a look at the current set of features - it's pretty packed for a 0.1.0:

• live reload: when anything changes, Gutenberg will do the minimum work required and will live reload assets (js/css/images/...) if possible
• syntax highlighting built-in via syntect
• pagination
• easy internal linking: they look like [my article](@/blog/blabla.md)
• automatic table of contents
• automatic insertion of anchors on titles: same as READMEs on Github
• shortcodes: when you want to insert some HTML in a page but don't want to copy the HTML everywhere. For example {{ youtube(id="dQw4w9WgXcQ") }} is a built-in shortcode and will insert the YouTube video for that id.
• Sass compilation
• RSS feed generation when requested
• Tags and categories generation when requested
• co-location of assets and content: when an article has some images and you want to keep them in the same folder

What's next🔗

The current features are pretty much what I wanted to have when I started Gutenberg but that doesn't mean there isn't anything left to do!

i18n🔗

The discussion started on github but as it isn't a feature I need, I would rather have someone else doing it, once there is consensus on the implementation

Alternative rendering backends🔗

Right now, only markdown is supported. While I definitely don't want to have too many backend, Asciidoc is one I was interested in and antoyo started working on a asciidoc implementation so it should be coming eventually!

Theme support🔗

An issue was opened on Gutenberg to support themes. While the idea in the issue is IMO too complex, I would like to have some theme support baked in gutenberg, unless the git clone a-template-repo approach is simpler.

Deploying🔗

A subcommand to upload/push the generated site to Github Pages/server/service could be nice. Maybe this can be resolved with documentation instead though.

A documentation site🔗

Now that things are a bit more stable in Gutenberg, I will start working on a documentation site as Gutenberg Readme is currently not nearly enough. I've already started one for Tera and am mostly waiting for design inspiration before publishing it.

Packaging🔗

Lastly, I think it's time to put Gutenberg in packages managers. I will probably put it on AUR if no one beats me to it but I will need help for the other package managers.

Conclusion🔗

As always I welcome any feedback. If you are using Gutenberg, please reply on this issue so I can update the list in the README.

Joyeux 14 Juillet!