Metalsmith SSG build synergy?

[webketje]

Hi David,
I am looking to provide some basic "starter repo's" for Metalsmith SSG, so I converted this template so it can be immediately edited and added to as a static site: https://github.com/metalsmith/startbootstrap-clean-blog. Thx to metalsmith's unopinionated nature, I had to alter almost nothing from the sources and was done in +- 2 hours. In the process of doing so, I wondered if perhaps startbootstrap could benefit from using metalsmith as the build pipeline: metalsmith can do all what the scripts files do and would allow users to write content in markdown and build more easily upon the existing template (and soon I will also add an esbuild bundler plugin).

I am aware static sites are not the only use case of these generic templates, but would argue the result is still more usable for any use case as the data is externalized. Also to be noted is that if you don't like the markdown, the content pages can also be pug templates (using @metalsmith/in-place)

It's also definitely a win for metalsmith because the alternative is (what I just did) forking the templates and manually keeping them in sync. Please clone the fork when you have some time and see if you like the added value it provides