Just wonder what can we do to bring this forum back to life.
Admins/mods & others - thoughts?
I also wondered a little. I think the original creators and contributors moved on to other projects/technologies. I’m a part-time web-developer with enough Ruby-knowledge to use the Middleman and the likes, make some extended custom programming with it, but I have neither experience nor time to dig the internals of MM. I tried to analyze some quirks and bugs but never got the point of making a fix inside MM codebase.
But hey, MM is quite complete and very useful in its current state. I’ve made some research to answer my own question: should I migrate new projects to something new? I took another look at Jekyll, again, and decided to stay in Middleman. For my needs MM plus essential plugins and some my own code is good enough for the projects that I do. (Again, I’m not a full-time web-dev.)
Has anyone any alternatives to Middleman to choose from?
Choosing between Jekyll and Middleman I also think Middleman wins, although Jekyll has more contributors and support.
Are there any, Ruby-based alternatives?
Just had a look at the https://github.com/middleman/middleman/issues/ section and I can see our hero Thomas Reynolds is actively discussing fixed and changes to the code. There’s hope! 
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This project still is being maintained indeed, it’s just that not a lot of questions are being asked on this forum anymore I suppose…
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I receive the weekly summary emails but that’s it. I’ll definitely respond if I see a question I can help with. But that’s pretty rare. I stopped using Middleman in favor of Hugo due to the incomplete documentation and lack of community interaction. I miss Middleman’s asset pipeline; but Hugo’s community was a huge draw.
Maybe Middleman isn’t meant for developers like me who don’t have a background in rails?
I’m looking into Hugo now, thanks for tip, @susodapop. But it seems to be strongly blog-related and not suited to create general simple websites with custom HTML structure as the basis of the work. Do I correctly understand?
Middleman is easy to grasp, and most people who learn Ruby are geeks, so they figure stuff out.
Hugo really excels at such websites. It lacks multi-template inheritance which Middleman supports. But single inheritance works fine using base templates. And it’s not married to the blog paradigm either. We’ve used it for software docs, photo galleries, and project portfolios. Structured data isn’t a problem either if you write a script to convert a CSV or JSON file into YAML files at build time.
Middleman does all of these too and most of it is built-in (huge plus). But I’m not a rubyist (Python / C# background) and the documentation assumes more knowledge of Ruby / Rails than I brought to the table. So it was easier to reason through the Hugo docs.
Thanks for additional info. I’m still reading the Hugo docs just to have a glimpse, but I haven’t installed it yet. What language is it based on? EDIT: got it already. Go.
I think the Middleman documentation is far behind the code status. This is an area that I could help. Only those pesky time constrains…