When I was building a robust website for having privacy friendly website analytics, simple uptime monitoring, status pages, user feedback all bundled together, I realized that my app website and marketing website needs to be different.
Why should my Marketing website aka landing page, docs, blog be separate
I wanted a simple no frills approach, setup once, infinitely configurable and static site generator with the capacity for super dynamic website in the future. I had this simple requirement and I set out on searching and finding the best possible way to do it. Along the way I found many alternatives, I didn't mind paying, but I wanted infinite customizable to exactly suit my needs. I stumbled upon
- Squarespace
- VuePress
- GitBook
- Jekyll
- Hugo
All these have amazing features and others have acheived greatness with this, but the paid solutions didn't give me confidence in their customizability, I have nothing against those but they aren't for the power users like me.
Next, the static site generators had plugins but nothing had out of the box solutions for documentation, yeah vue press but I'm not much of a vue guy I'm a react guy since my application front end is in Next Js I didnt' want to have a lot of context switch.
Hugo, Jekyll are in languages I am not familiar with and again I didn't want to do a lot of context switching.
GitBook is also an amazing solution for documentation but not so amazing for having a unified solution with landing page and dynamic content the way I wanted.
So finally I stumbled upon Docusaurus and I can't be more delighted with the support, out of the box solutions and best of all its in react. Fully customizable, out of the box markdown support, out of the box documentation support, it can run Jsx to run any dynamic stuff I want to run later, out of the box rss support, reading time and literally all the basic tiny details. And it was a joy to setup. Love the contributors to docusaurus and I would recommend more people to definitely use it. And its documentation is in a github repo so I can locally build and access it while flying without any issue.