When I posted on LinkedIn that I had switched from Wordpress to Hugo, my friend Alex introduced me to Publii, another open source static site generator.

I decided to check it out.

If you are moving from Wordpress, Publii offers a similar experience. Instead of running it from the command line to generate your pages from markdown, you launch an app which comes with a visual editor, although you can also use raw HTML or markdown as well.

I followed the instructions for exporting my Wordpress site and importing it in Publii, and while it worked well for the text, it only migrated about a quarter of the images. I ended up having to manually move the images from my /wp-content directory, which was organized by month, to the proper directory for Publii, which was organized by post.

I found a free theme called Square that was close to what I was looking for, although I spent way more time than I wanted to editing the css to get it to look the way I wanted. I wanted a smaller sidebar, one that took up about 20% of the page, versus the default which was 50% of the page, and nothing I changed in the Layout of the UI seemed to help.

I seriously thought about staying on Publii, but its similarity to Wordpress actually worked against it. I had already been stung once by a vendor controlled open source project and I didn’t want to repeat the experience.

Not that I’m complaining about Publii’s business model. Building a commercial marketplace around an open source project is a good way to monetize it, but the newness of the project means that a lot of things that are easy in Hugo are either missing or cost money in Publii.

Plus, as I write this there are 30 themes listed on the Publii website, while there are more than 20 times that available for Hugo. This doesn’t necessarily reflect the quality of the themes (I’m certain more of the Hugo themes are not being maintained) but it does give one more options with Hugo.

Finally, Publii is written in Javascript and the static output has a lot more Javascript than the output produced by Hugo. Not that people are going to spend much time looking at the raw HTML, but the Hugo output is just cleaner.

However, if you are not that comfortable with the command line or markdown, Publii looks like a great option. My site turned out okay.