I’m currently in the process of converting my most complex Wordpress site into a Hugo site, and comments proved to be one of the greater challenges. My approach went from screw comments, to let’s use Disqus, to no let’s do this right and use a static comment system.
I’m still riding this wave of excitement for static sites and free hosting, so the next step for me was to build my code documentation right into my Hugo sites instead of a separate standalone instance on Github Pages.
Shortcodes allow you to add external content to a blog post in a user friendly way. Someone’s tweet, an instagram photo, forms, and so on. Instead of a long ugly snippet of JavaScript, you can paste one line of clean shortcode. Hugo has built in shortcode support, and adding a custom shortcode is super easy.
Just when I thought my publishing setup was finalized, I stumbled across Forestry. Forestry appears to solve my GUI wishlist all at once. GUI for Hugo? Check. Well designed for clients? Check. Can be mapped to my URL? Check. Well supported and documented? Check.
The promising aspect of Beaker is that all web technologies work as expected. The fact that visting a site is as simple as creating an index.html and placing dat instead of http in front of the URL is a great start. The trickier aspect is teaching yourself to think in terms of a static, shared infrastructure instead of a central one. No database means that a static CMS is needed to manage the blog.