I'm a huge fan of Hugo because it is a single binary and full of useful features, however I certainly think there is a lot of room for improvement. While Go templating may not be everyone's cup of tea, it is simple enough and the additional functions added by Hugo cover a lot of use cases.
Hugo has shown me that my ideal generator will likely be built with Go, although I could see a C, C++, or possibly Rust equivalent being fine for my needs. However, what I desire more than anything is to have a really performant default template using pagination and hierarchy based on the file system.
I don't want to have to define titles or empty _index.md files to define sections, just want to point it at a nestable directory on my file system and use filenames for pages and directories for sections. This significantly improves the usefulness for anyone, because at that point it can be used as a knowledgebase/note-taking system from the get-go without needing any custom templating to make it work out of the box.
The other important factor is building in search capabilities. While I think that client-side JavaScript and a JSON output works for this goal and can be optimized, Xapian would be a great alternative and extend the usefulness outside of the JavaScript browserbase. So far Hugo has left serving production sites up to third-party web servers, but I see no reason why they couldn't finish implementing the `serve` components to be production-ready and implement a search component and possibly other dynamic components.
I really hope to see someone with a strong understanding of efficiency come in and own this arena building off Hugo's single binary approach, but with an open mind to make it robust to handle all kinds of self-hosted content. Even implementing a bookmark manager using this approach would be awesome, having it auto-sort YAML/TOML/HCL or whatever and be able to serve up searchable bookmarks without even relying on JavaScript. The possibilities are endless with the types of apps that can be built with this design using readable files as data for the content.
Hugo has shown me that my ideal generator will likely be built with Go, although I could see a C, C++, or possibly Rust equivalent being fine for my needs. However, what I desire more than anything is to have a really performant default template using pagination and hierarchy based on the file system.
I don't want to have to define titles or empty _index.md files to define sections, just want to point it at a nestable directory on my file system and use filenames for pages and directories for sections. This significantly improves the usefulness for anyone, because at that point it can be used as a knowledgebase/note-taking system from the get-go without needing any custom templating to make it work out of the box.
The other important factor is building in search capabilities. While I think that client-side JavaScript and a JSON output works for this goal and can be optimized, Xapian would be a great alternative and extend the usefulness outside of the JavaScript browserbase. So far Hugo has left serving production sites up to third-party web servers, but I see no reason why they couldn't finish implementing the `serve` components to be production-ready and implement a search component and possibly other dynamic components.
I really hope to see someone with a strong understanding of efficiency come in and own this arena building off Hugo's single binary approach, but with an open mind to make it robust to handle all kinds of self-hosted content. Even implementing a bookmark manager using this approach would be awesome, having it auto-sort YAML/TOML/HCL or whatever and be able to serve up searchable bookmarks without even relying on JavaScript. The possibilities are endless with the types of apps that can be built with this design using readable files as data for the content.