Hey Zola folks,
I’ve been running Zola in production for the past 8–9 months on a couple of sites, one of which is a bit unusual for typical SSG use: a detailed guide to daytime yacht cruises in Dubai (routes, realistic costs, booking advice, photos, seasonal notes, etc.). It’s not a blog or dev portfolio—more like a niche informational site for tourists/operators.
What made Zola a solid fit here:
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Extremely fast builds even with 100+ Markdown pages full of images (high-res galleries via shortcodes)
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Tera’s flexibility for things like conditional pricing tables (e.g., peak vs off-season) and RTL support experiments for Arabic
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Taxonomies worked great for organizing routes (Marasi Bay, Dubai Marina, Palm Jumeirah) and yacht types → auto-generated index pages
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Built-in Sass, image processing hints, and automatic sitemap/robots.txt helped with SEO basics without extra plugins
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One-command deploy to Vercel/Netlify keeps things simple—no backend headaches
A few custom bits I ended up using:
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Shortcodes for repeatable elements like “inclusions list” and “cost breakdown tables”
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Front-matter sorting + filters for a “recently updated tips” section
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Some i18n setup with language-specific taxonomies (still tweaking RTL direction in CSS)
The site itself is here if anyone wants to see how it renders in a travel/content-heavy context (this specific page covers daytime cruise costs, routes, and practical tips): https://www.yachtdxb.com/news/dubai-daytime-yacht-cruise-rental-costs-routes-booking-tips/
It’s been a good learning experience about structuring real-world content in Zola beyond dev docs or personal blogs.
A couple open questions I’d love input on:
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For Arabic RTL: any reliable way to handle mixed LTR/RTL content in Tera templates without breaking layouts?
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Handling semi-dynamic updates (like seasonal price changes) — do most people just rebuild on webhook, or is there a smarter partial rebuild pattern?
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Large image optimization best practices in Zola (beyond zola --base-url and manual responsive images)?
Curious how others are tackling similar non-standard projects with Zola. Thanks for any thoughts!
Cheers,
chenlanlan