Recently I made the shift from Pelican to Hugo, and so far I am loving it!
What drove me to change static site generators was mostly down to theme support, for Pelican I could not find themes that I liked that were actively maintained. While a less important factor, I also found Pelican difficult to initially set-up the config. With Hugo both of these problems were no longer a factor, I was able to find an actively maintained theme I liked and then configuration was a breeze. Since Pelican also used mark down files for content all I needed to do was update each of my posts with the front matter that Hugo takes, this includes things like tags, title, author, etc.
From the change I also gained some very handy features, these are my favourite features so far
- Extremely quick building in general, but the awesome feature of LiveReload for during development.
- A built in HTTP server for local development, results are instant so you can write, or make changes to the theme, etc. and see the result very quickly.
- A very nice system to declare tags, URL aliases, categories, whether something is a draft or not, etc. there are so many convenient and well thought of features.
- Automatic RSS creation.
- Built in syntax highlighting.
All in all it was approximately a weekend project to get done, and it was completed at a leisurely pace at that.