Building static websites with Drupal

I've been using Drupal since 2008 and built the first version of my website with Drupal 6 before updating it to Drupal 7.

Around that time, I discovered static site generators and built the next version of my website with Jekyll.

I liked how I could write content in simple plain files, export them to HTML and upload them to a server.

Static websites are fast and secure.

There was no need for PHP or a database. Just a simple web server like Apache or Nginx that can serve static files.

I later switched to Sculpin, a static site generator written with PHP, which has a lot of similarities with Drupal.

But what if you want the power of Drupal with the benefits of a static website?

Tome is a module that turns Drupal into a static site generator.

Drupal works the same locally with access to all the usual core functionality and contrib modules and themes from Drupal.org, but you export everything to static files - the same as using Jekyll or Sculpin.

Sam Mortenson, the creator of the Tome module discussed it on our episode of the Beyond Blocks podcast where we also talked about single file components.

If you want the power of a flexible content management system and the performance and security benefits of a static website, Tome gives you the best of both worlds.