Content JSON files
While I agree that writing content to JSON files does reduce the barrier for entry for features such as search and related post recommendation I honestly don’t believe that it’s absolutely necessary. That being said, I haven’t been able to quite wrap my mind around a better way of doing things so while I’m not entirely against the proposal I’m not sure that I’d mark it as a v1.0 requirement. Honestly, what percentage of static sites truly depend on native search?
I’m actually quite flexible on this one. If someone who truly cares about the functionality is able to commit some production quality code, go for it, otherwise, I don’t think it should be considered a blocker.
Native internationalisation and localisation support
This is, without a doubt, a v1.0 requirement and I say this as a native speaker of English who, having a very limited appeal, doesn’t typically worry about such functionality.
Plugins
People might come for performance, ease of deployment, etcetera, but they stay for addon functionality which is important to them.
Migration
Personally, migration from other platforms doesn’t fit what I view as a core issue. Yes, it’s absolutely important, but, is there any reason that such tools can successfully exist outside the release structure and timeline of Hugo’s core?
Deployment
See above.
Related posts
The functionality required for this feature is intrinsically linked to the search functionality and in my opinion should be treated as such.
Image resizing and cropping
This is the definition of a core requirement.
Native implementation of core formats
While not everyone may agree I personally believe that this is also core to Hugo. Yes, in an idea world we’d only have a single markup to rule them all. Unfortunately, this isn’t such a world. Markdown, AsciiDoc, and reStructuredText are today’s de facto standards when it comes to safe markup languages (I’m intentionally ignoring HTML as it is in no way safe). Two core feature of Hugo are its blazing speed and single binary (i.e. zero dependency) distribution. Without native implementations of the core formats one or both of these points is sacrificed.
Documentation
Absolutely. This bullet point is more than a little personal for me. Since discovering Hugo, I had planned to contribute heavily to the documentation effort. Unfortunately, a variety of personal/family circumstances have made that essentially impossible. This is something that I plan on changing in a major way in the coming year.