After going through StaticGen, I was thinking of Jekyll, Hugo or Pelican. Jekyll because it's most popular, Hugo because it's the second new comer and Pelican because I know Python. I tried Hugo first and bump into a few issues, then tried Jekyll for an hour and realize Hugo is actually simpler and cleaner. I didn't get to try Pelican.
Pros
The following are my reasons for using Hugo:
- Hugo is fast.
- Easy to setup (no need development environment setup, just executable only).
- Work well out of the box: it comes with default set of features (alias, taxonomy, rss, sitemap, etc.) without the need to install plugins.
- The layout and workflow is pretty simple and clean.
- It comes with a web sever and livereload by default.
- Hugo is the 2nd most popular static site generator.
Cons
A few disadvantages of using Hugo:
- Not familar with Go Templates increase learning and troubleshooting time significantly. I think Jinja is more flexible and powerful than Go Templates.
- Hugo documentation is alright, but not top notch, complete or super friendly.
- You will find out not all themes work out of the box, thus you need to learn the templates and edit them.
- I believe Hugo doesn't support plugins (you pray all the features you need is provided by Hugo).
- I think tools written in scripting language like Ruby, Python and JavaScript is easier to extend.