Pelican

There tend to be two philosophies regarding the best options for web development and design. Where quality design once demanded an advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS, and possibly JavaScript, the rise of content management systems like WordPress have made the development of things accessible to just about anyone. With the right CMS, you can essentially build the site of your dreams while barely understanding a line of code. Drag and drop has replaced neatly formatted lines for many looking to create a website. But the limitations are noticeable and lurking right on the surface. While a CMS can offer you all the fundamentals you need to build a site, that simplicity comes at a cost. You're typically locked in to the eccentricities of the platform, and there's much less room to bypass them with the more versatile methods of pure coding. Pelican provides a middle ground between these two philosophies, and it's one of the best static site generators around. Pelican simplifies the process of uploading your sites. You can write a page in pure code and upload it to your server with no fuss. Along with that comes the promise that its functionality is dependent entirely on the quality of your code rather than any wrinkles in the management system you're using. Your content can be written in Markdown, reStructuredText, or AsciiDo formats without you having to be concerned about anything getting lost along the way. Just as important, all the site you've written is stored directly on your hard drive rather than on a remote server, so you can fully prototype what you want to do locally and know that the results will be replicated when it goes up for business. Creating more basic pages in Pelican requires a more fundamental understanding of code than accomplishing the same results in a CMS, but Pelican really shines when you start working no more complex principles that contradict the framework your CMS was built on. A project that might just require CSS, JS, and HTML in Pelican could require pulling in a knowledge of various other directory systems and APIs if you were to use a more conventional CMS. Pelican probably won't excel if you have a simple premise you want to put into action, but it's great for the developer who doesn't want to wrestle with multiple and complex layers of code to solve a problem they already know the answer to. With Pelican, there are no databases to manage, and none of your code runs through the server, meaning that the results are both more secure and likely to run faster than they would with a more traditional setup. Pelican is also an open source and free program, meaning you can tinker with its inner workings to your heart's delight.