Good day, friends. I would like to briefly tell you about the technologies used for our website. Perhaps this easy-to-learn technology will help other start-up groups or trade unions easily organize an independent information distribution channel.

We don’t have a lot of free human resources, so we chose the “cheap” option and built a website on the Hugo static website generator. This principle of building sites is interesting in the absence of a database and a backend transmitting data from the database to the front. Notes are formatted as text files in Markdown format, which are compiled into a ready-made set of html+ js+css before launching the web server. Such a simple technology gives a lot of advantages and disadvantages compared to traditional Wordpress and Joomla:

Positive:

  • Easily and quickly deployed on the server or moved from one server to another.
  • Does not require reservation. All data is stored in git.
  • A very difficult target for Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. And it is impossible to pick up a password, because there is no administrator interface.
  • There is no need for functionality-limited WYSIWYG editors.
  • Placed anywhere, somewhere even for free.
  • Ideal for indexing by search engines and caching on CDN, reducing the load on the server to almost zero.
  • Does not collect data and does not store cookies

Minuses:

  • It is impossible to organize mailing lists and subscriptions for users
  • Comments only through separate services like Disqus or Cactus
  • No plugins

A large number of design themes, support for multilingualism, tags and site search makes Hugo an excellent tool for microblogging or a business card site. But it works even better in conjunction with GitLab or GitHub, which provide collaborative editing with role management and storing the history of changes. You can also deploy the site on GitLab Pages or GitHub Pages for free, without bothering to rent and maintain VDS.