History
Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about about the issue that was created by someone who was interested in trying out zola. At first I was thinking about a programmatic solution (like adding a command line argument that would generate the demo form the overview) but I felt that making the overall application more complicated in an effort to make initial testing easier didn’t make sense. However, I thought of a more practical way to simplify initial onboarding and testing (see below).
Proposal
I think creating the sample site described in the overview and bundling the files into an easily downloadable package would be a good starting point. That way to be able to test zola one would not need to spend the time to “do” all the steps in the overview. They could just download the files and run zola serve.
Further thoughts
While I think doing the steps was beneficial to me it did take me quite a while to get it done and I can see how this would be a turn off for a lot people. Not really sure what is the best way to package the files. A git repo is what comes to mind but not sure what the best way is. An added advantage of using a git repo would be that they could see how the basic site would look using github pages, without needing to have installed zola yet (this may be undesirable as they may rate it based on the no CSS and miss the point). This might help them understand how the whole thing works.