> At it's core most static site generators are just fancy "string concatenation" tools.
I think that's a bit reductive (especially since template libraries themselves are already complicated, not in a bad way). To me a static site generator is: 1) a string template library, plus 2) a file system walker/trigger to generate from a template, plus 3) additional data to feed the templates, plus 4) the actual content.
Then there's of course the additional features you may or may not need: a tagging system, a comment system, a subscription system, etc.
Thankfully despite all these components you don't need to write much of the actual code since they all exist as builtin (file system walking) or major OSS (Jinja, Mustache.js, etc) libraries. The SSG is primarily glue.
I think that's a bit reductive (especially since template libraries themselves are already complicated, not in a bad way). To me a static site generator is: 1) a string template library, plus 2) a file system walker/trigger to generate from a template, plus 3) additional data to feed the templates, plus 4) the actual content.
Then there's of course the additional features you may or may not need: a tagging system, a comment system, a subscription system, etc.
Thankfully despite all these components you don't need to write much of the actual code since they all exist as builtin (file system walking) or major OSS (Jinja, Mustache.js, etc) libraries. The SSG is primarily glue.