I made a static site generator in PHP (and it's fast)

I published an async Resonance PHP framework. I decided also to implement a static site generator to create elaborate documentation or static pages:

Why?

I aimed to solve a few issues:

1. I wanted to use something other than Docusaurus because its build times are generally slow: https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/discussions/3132. I made performance my priority
2. I wanted to use the same tech stack as the core framework, and no major Static Site Generators in PHP were ready to use.
3. I wanted to use something other than React. Instead, I opted for Stimulus + Turbo, which is a much lighter approach.

Design Choices

Front-Matter

I borrowed the idea of Front-Matter from Jekyll, but I made some adjustments,

Jekyll's front-matter is pretty loose - you can input any properties you want in Resonance. I used a strict validation for the sake of consistency:

---
collections: 
    - documents
draft: true
layout: dm:document
parent: docs/features/index
title: "Machine Learning"
description: ">"
    Learn how to incorporate Machine Learning features into your application.
---

Front matter is used to render metadata like <meta name="description"> and various hints in the documentation.

Consistency Above All

It's possible to link documents in a wiki-like fashion by using {{ and }} and pointing to the linked file. For example, if you have a file in docs/features/test.md,, you can create an <a> link to that file with {{docs/features/test}}. All the links are checked while rebuilding the documentation to ensure each is valid.

Ordering of Documents

Instead of some global index of documents, I ordered them by references. You can use fields like next or parent in the front matter to order them relatively to each other:

---
collections: 
    - documents
layout: dm:document
next: docs/features/asset-bundling-esbuild/preloading-assets
parent: docs/features/asset-bundling-esbuild/index
title: Cache Busting
description: >
    Prevent unwanted caching with esbuild features.
---

Thanks to that, maintaining the documentation is more straightforward than maintaining another global list of pages with their ordering rules.

Custom Layouts

You can create your custom layouts and reference them in the front matter, making it easy to have shared layouts across multiple pages.

Collections

You can add pages to collections to put them into the site's primary navigation or side menus:

---

collections: 

    - documents

    - name: primary_navigation

      next: tutorials/index

description: docs

layout: dm:document

title: Documentation

---

Summary

I hope this generator will be helpful to you. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, and leave me a star if you would like it. Good luck!

You can find documentation and installation instructions here: https://resonance.distantmagic.com/docs/features/generating-static-sites/