We seem to be a bunch of people with a lot of energy, opinions and experience (and hopefully some time on our hands). Why not try to get a proper templating engine and a good Markdown/*down parser into OTP (or at least onto Hex)?
I don’t think the Erlang page is so bad is at to be replaced pronto, so I personally think the Erlang community is best served by focusing on getting at least some steps closer to being able to generate the page in the environment we’re all familiar with.
Templating engine (aka compiler), as used by Zotonic:
We also have markdown-to-HTML and HTML-to-markdown functions in Zotonic. Might be possible to split those out to their own packages.
Is it possible to extend the markdown syntax like MDX does? The ideal format is to be markdown first with the ability to drop components in markdown docs when needed
Yeah, I thought about mentioning Zotonic.
I think the best would be EEPs for some official building blocks in OTP, in the same vein as the new JSON parser.
I think a good templating engine would be useful for many projects. That was something I immediately missed when trying the new triple quoted docstrings.
bbmustache is what I normally use but the standard is a bit limited.
I’m late to the party, but why not Hugo? Or really anything like it. My understanding is Next.js is a React framework. Major overkill for a language website. The content is static.
Personally I do like the Rust site, https://www.rust-lang.org/, and how it has breakdowns of where Rust is best used and then examples Embedded devices - Rust Programming Language with code and libraries, plus quotes from those using it in those areas in production.
The hardest part would be getting the content.
So yea, my suggestion is always to use a static site generator, Hugo just happens to be the one I use for a number of sites.
And if there is a huge desire to somehow use Erlang in the stack my suggestion would be to find a CDN that uses Erlang internally 
since this doesn’t even require we run a webserver anywhere at all, it can just be uploaded somewhere to be hosted as html for free or very minimal cost.
Or, call out in the page that it isn’t running Erlang to host it but then write up about where Erlang is used in the Internet and how “you very well may have gone through a node controlled by Erlang to reach this site” and “when you text this link to your friend, it is going through Erlang”.
Use the right tool for the job. Erlang doesn’t have to be the right tool for generating static websites, esp generating static websites with a large existing community of easy to use plugins and shortcuts. Forcing Erlang into this role is what I’d consider energy spent elsewhere. And I’ve seen this happen plenty of times.
+1
I think that the idea was to use Zotonic as a static page generator, not to run a webserer. Hugo is indeed a great battle-tested choice, but since Zotonic has similar possibilities I’d choose it over Hugo since it will be a lot easier for me to debug/contribute to.
What is Zotonic site generation done with? Hugo is just markdown and yaml/toml configuration. Something most around here I suspect already know.
Or do you mean debug/contribute to the actual hugo/zotonic? I don’t see that being something anyone has to do for this.
If I understood it right, its also done in Markdown.