It is complex. I found the documentation was not structured to naturally align with the discovery process I went through in learning how it works. I found myself reading the Go source and using a debugger to step through execution to get a better understanding. I had a similar first experience.
For simple websites you need no "scaffolding", you can just edit the html in a text editor. Really just write the text between the tags. Better to meditate over simplicity and minimalism than to start another software project just to publish a blog.
Ah ok, you started with suggesting Hugo might be a bit complex...
I thought I might have found an ally, someone who has been around for a bit and wary of the cambrian explosion of software projects. Someone who no longer believes in all that software that comes out, with new, cool features that add functionality, but, in my opinion, add subtle difficulty along the way that's hard to account for, death by a thousand cuts that must eventually lead to some kind of fatigue. Things that update and break and change and are deprecated and abandoned and require use of a different language, different build chain, different mental model, just to "add some posts from time to time" to a blog.
Please excuse this little rant. I truly believe that anyone can find their sweet spot with any system. But what is the right fit for your relatives who want it dead simple?
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Speaking of complex tooling you don't think Hugo is a bit complex itself?
Took Hugo for a test drive using official quick start.
Half the themes from official docs wouldn't compile.
Started looking into architecture but official docs do not explain the big picture just a bunch of instructions.
The official documentation does not explain on what is going behind the scenes very well.
I mean, I will obviously want some sort of scaffolding and a way of changing it but this https://gohugo.io/getting-started/directory-structure/ is not helping very much.
Since you are not supposed to write go code everything has to be done through .toml config files as far as I could grok.
I feel I'd rather write my own static generator in language of my choice(say Python) than keep up with the Hugo docs.
It is complex. I found the documentation was not structured to naturally align with the discovery process I went through in learning how it works. I found myself reading the Go source and using a debugger to step through execution to get a better understanding. I had a similar first experience.
For simple websites you need no "scaffolding", you can just edit the html in a text editor. Really just write the text between the tags. Better to meditate over simplicity and minimalism than to start another software project just to publish a blog.
That's the thing, I've been writing HTML for 25 years and JS for over 20.
Lately I've been writing a lot of .md when writing Jupyter Notebooks.
Thus I figured that Hugo would offer some advantages to relatives who wanted a dead simple site that they wanted to add some posts from time to time.
Static site would be perfect for them but I do not want to manually add their posts...
Started looking into Forestry.io and well it is not quite as simple as Netlify.
Ah ok, you started with suggesting Hugo might be a bit complex...
I thought I might have found an ally, someone who has been around for a bit and wary of the cambrian explosion of software projects. Someone who no longer believes in all that software that comes out, with new, cool features that add functionality, but, in my opinion, add subtle difficulty along the way that's hard to account for, death by a thousand cuts that must eventually lead to some kind of fatigue. Things that update and break and change and are deprecated and abandoned and require use of a different language, different build chain, different mental model, just to "add some posts from time to time" to a blog.
Please excuse this little rant. I truly believe that anyone can find their sweet spot with any system. But what is the right fit for your relatives who want it dead simple?
Have you looked into Netlify CMS? https://www.netlifycms.org/