About

Zola at a Glance

Zola is a static site generator (SSG), similar to Hugo, Pelican, and Jekyll (for a comprehensive list of SSGs, please see Jamstack). It is written in Rust and uses the Tera template engine, which is similar to Jinja2, Django templates, Liquid, and Twig. Content is written in CommonMark, a strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown.

SSGs use dynamic templates to transform content into static HTML pages. Static sites are thus very fast and require no databases, making them easy to host. A comparison between static and dynamic sites, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Django, can be found here.

To get a taste of Zola, please see the quick overview below.

First Steps with Zola

Unlike some SSGs, Zola makes no assumptions regarding the structure of your site. In this overview, we'll be making a simple blog site.