Investigate simpler tech stacks

[denisw]

Background

As the Masifunde team does not have any people experienced with web development, the current React + styled-components + Next.js stack might be too sophisticated for them to do even small changes themselves. Also, Next.js and the React ecosystem is evolving at a high pace, which causes a relatively high investment to keep things up-to-date.

A simpler approach may be desirable. It should also be feasible as the site is mostly static HTML and CSS, with only two interactive components:

• A carousel on the homepage
• A donation form with light validation

This means that essentially, we would only need the following capabilities:

• HTML templates
• CSS pre-processing (possibly just bundling)
• Fetching data from Contentful for (static) rendering
• Some light touches of JS for the interactive features mentioned above

To Do

• Collect and evaluate "low-tech" tech stacks for the site.
• Decide whether we want to try and move to one of these stacks.

[jdwillemse]

I think after our conversation today this would be a real win as Felix would be able to help himself around an HTML file

[denisw]

Agreed. Let's collect possible tech stacks here.

Candidates we identified so far:

• Eleventy
  • ✅ Simple and minimal
  • ✅ Windows-friendly as it is based on Node.js
  • ✅ Offers template data files as a straightforward way for fetch page data from Contentful
  • ⚠️ No built-in or straightforward approach to internationalized routes (/en and /de version) - might need to write a small plugin
• Jekyll
  • Similar to Eleventy (for which Jekyll was the inspiration)
  • ✅ Very mature as it has been around for a long time
  • ⛔️ Windows not officially supported