Static website generators have been around for ages. Though, but they were not popular like dynamic websites with database back-end web applications, most likely because dynamic rich websites are easy to edit, update and manage through a fancy dashboard like WordPress and Joomla.

I have good experience with static generators using Nuxt, Next, Hugo, I even build mine using Nuxt aiming to evolve it as a data portal in the next few months. Although the concept of the static generator is old, it's trending again.

There are many static website generators with popular languages like Python, JavaScript (NodeJS), Go, Ruby, C#, Haskell and PHP.

Static website generators are easy to use for developers, geeks and hackers with good coding skills, but they are hard for normal users "Humans". Here we are presenting Publii a static website generator desktop application that built for humans.

Publii; The perfect static website generator for humans

Publii is a desktop application for Windows, Linux and macOS that helps users with limited coding experience to build their website and publish it with ease.

A magazine website Theme for Publii

Powerful user-interface

It has a simple yet powerful dashboard-alike desktop very similar to web application, allowing users to add/ manage pages, menu, tags, authors,  the website settings and design.  The default install has one template (theme)

What can you create with Publii?

  • Static web-pages
  • Blogs
  • Company website
  • Portfolio
  • Gallery

Features:

  • Pages, Menu, Tags, Author Management
  • Rich text editor (WYSIWYG)
  • Layout management
  • One-click deployment
  • Backup management
  • Regenerate thumbnails
  • Media/ File Manager
  • WP Importer
  • Built-in FTP and SFTP support
  • Settings manager
  • SEO Ready
  • Social media tags support
  • Sitemap support
  • AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) support
  • GDPR (Cookies banner)
  • Website speed file optimization
  • Nice-URL
Tools

Advanced options for developers

  • Custom CSS
  • Custom HTML

Benefits of using Publii:

  • Easy-to-use
  • Multiple deployment options
  • Backup management
  • Multiple theme/ Templates

Multiple deployment options

Deployment
  • Github
  • Gitlab
  • FTP
  • SFTP
  • Netlify
  • Google Cloud
  • Export it as a Zip file

Themes Marketplace

Publii's team created a marketplace for their project. It contains beautiful multipurpose themes for blogging, magazine, web documentation and creative portfolio. Most of the current themes are free to download and use.

Themes can be added with just drag-n-drop of the zipped theme file into the themes manager.

Publii for designers and developers

It's easy to build a theme for Publii as the developers have released clear documentation. It's very similar to Ghost.blogging themes. We hope to see more of free themes in the future.

Conclusion

Publii is a very innovative replacement to the geeky way of building a static-generated website, it saves time and effort. It's the first of its kind aiming for humans with no coding experience.