Thank you for being a long-term subscriber. 🙏🏼. This probably deserves a longer answer that could make for a good blog post, but in short: Drupal’s publishing workflow is a lot easier and faster than those of SSGs. I don’t see why they are so much better …
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Friendlier UI, that's for sure. There are some initiatives trying to create a CMS-like experience over plain markdown files and git, but none compares to a proper content management system.
Static sites are kind of the ultimate caching system. Faster and has zero attacking surface. There is no zero-day for plain HTML. And some prefer managing content directly in files, like programmers that use vim instead IDEs. Kinda charming, if you ask me.
I wonder if a Drupal plugin could generate the whole site as static content. Especially good if it could publish the result on a separate, public, server. It would get the best of both worlds.
While static sites can offer better performance and security in theory, they don't always do in practice.
My Drupal-powered site, https://dri.es/, is fast and secure. In fact, it is 3x faster than https://gohugo.io/ and https://jekyllrb.com/ -- the official websites of two leading static site generators.
The speed and performance of a website depends more on the quality of the generated HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code than the underlying technology used (e.g. CMS vs SSG).
Drupal allows you to use various input formats, such as Markdown. So, if you prefer using Markdown, you can easily use it in Drupal.
Drupal has a module called Tome (https://youtu.be/uqmq5FBP_T0) that enables it to generate static sites. Moreover, Drupal is frequently used as the content repository/backend for Gastby (https://www.drupal.org/project/gatsby), NextJS sites (https://next-drupal.org/) and others. Check it out!
Just read your latest post (https://dri.es/why-content-management-systems-can-outperform-static-site-generators)!! Even if this thread was not the catalyst, I'm happy by the discussion (which, btw, I've started as more like a curiosity thing than anything else. I totally understand the dogfood initiative).
It's late here but I later I will bring back some points:
1* the importance of clicking "publish" and getting the results. IMHO it is only useful for news sites and such
2* the benchmark table. I think it was a deliberated list of competitors that do not properly use CND/cache/Cloudflare or proper use of 3rd party libraries.
anyway, I totally can see the benefit of the workflow. 1000x better, I can attest to it!
PS: I would NEVER worry about `https://dri.es/admin` if eventually a zero-day PHP bug eventually appears since a static site is essentially stateless.
For the benchmarks, I just went with the most popular SSGs. Happy to add others to the list! I’m not sure which ones use a CDN. Even if they use a CDN, my site is likely to be faster still.
Most definitively, given the number of images they use. Dri.es is a unique case, coz you do not use almost any image or script and the home page is super minimalistic. The such experiment should use the same site in all systems. Iike exporting dri.es as plain HTML and hosting in an equivalent server/CDN.
Would be nice to check the server requirements to run cms+caching vs an HTTP server like Nginx to achieve the same results.
All this will address only the argued performance gains from STG, not the workflow.
Yep, there's a module that will take your Drupal site and generate a static site. Its called [Tome](https://www.drupal.org/project/tome).
For years I've used curl to do this for sites that no longer need updates. Hosting a static HTML site is much easier to secure as well.
Additionally there are many hybrids of this where you use Drupal as the CMS and a node server will use the Drupal REST API as the data source and generate a static site.