Hugo limits? How far can we go with static site generators?

Meta
1

Hi folks!
Ever since I started working on my own small website and later on bigger websites with wordpress, I started to be a bit sceptical about this “dynamic” site generator approach and thought of more static alternatives. Finally I started to research and found that there are indeed people of the same mindset and I found hugo!

Now I’m pretty fascinated by this project, but I also wonder how far we can go with static site generators. I mean small “more static” sites are obvious candidates for this approach, but what about stuff like social media sites, where content is pretty much generated on the go (and in parallel)?

I wonder in how far this might be tchnically implemented by static site generators like hugo. Since, as far as I understand, the technical barrier to implement such stuff staticly was the compilation speed and delay. With hugo being based on the golang though (being able to generate 5000 post in ~7 seconds) I wonder if this changes the status quo?!

Would a social media site (like facebook) be theoretically possible to be static?! Is there something I did not take into account? I have my doubts, but I’m really curious about your opinion on this matter! :slight_smile:

regards,
Philip

PS: btw is this forum and text editor generated staticly or dynamicly on server site?

1 Like
2

Server side; the forum uses Discourse.

3

I’ve also had this preference - and to that end (many years ago now) wrote
a Wiki tool based on this idea

All Wiki Pages were static html, with an embedded JS based wysiwyg HTML
editor, which used WEBDAV to send updates to the subversion server that was
used as the backend.

extremely fast and scalable :slight_smile:

Using that kind of backend, with server side triggers to update a
statically generated search / query index - where searches then happen in
the user’s browser are totally possible.

1 Like