Static-site publishing (umbrella)
Publishing the web by pre-rendering at build time rather than assembling pages per-request from a database — the shift this wiki tracks, away from the request-time CMS (the wordpress model) and toward a build-and-serve pipeline. The umbrella concept; across the sources it decomposes into three layers:
- The generator — static-site-generator compiles content + templates into HTML ahead of time, the genre’s core. Instances bet on different axes: build speed (hugo, zola, eleventy) vs. runtime experience (astro with islands-architecture and a zero-JS default), plus a docs-first sub-genre (Docusaurus / VitePress / MkDocs).
- The architecture — jamstack: pre-rendered markup served from a CDN with APIs filling the dynamic gaps, and headless-cms as the content-management half a pre-rendered site still needs (content-as-API, decoupled from presentation).
- The yardstick — core-web-vitals, where the build-time approach claims its edge (and the bridge to the sibling webperf-wiki).
The through-line
The monolithic CMS did content, rendering, and serving at once; static-site publishing splits that into one-job layers — headless content → SSG build → CDN delivery — and the recurring question is where the category’s boundary sits: how much client JS rides along, and where “static-site generator” blurs into “web framework.” See synthesis.