I am currently working on a mostly static website. In general, it would seem as if Meteor would not be the right choice for something like this. At the same time, I will also want to include a contact form, for which Meteor I think would be well suited.
Is it crazy to create a Meteor app just to support the contact form/feature?
Any other alternatives I might consider?
Thanks for any tips and advice!
-Anders
Meteor can be overkill for a simple, mostly static site. However, if you’re interested in learning more about Meteor, etc., then it could still be a worthwhile investment of your time. Also, it’s really easy to spin up an Ubuntu droplet and mupx your app, so you don’t have to worry about things like server config, etc.
expressjs with handlebars is very common for static websites. You can even add compression, caching etc.
Meteor is really bad if you want to get a pre-made theme (like a Bootstrap theme) and expect to plug-and-play. You’ll be doing a lot of messing around to get all the script files to load in the order that you want.
For email and contact form stuff I would be using something like Mandrill or MailChimp’s API for emails anyway, which you don’t need Meteor for.
When you say ‘mostly static’, do you mean ‘static except the contact form’?
If so, a very simple PHP/Python script that takes the form and uses Mandrill API (which Mandrill provides a library for) would be more than enough in your case.
Yup, at this point, the only feature that is not just static content is the contact form. (Of course, that could change at any moment.)
I settled on express w nodemailer.
Thanks all for your advice!
I find it a pity that meteor does NOT seem to have any solution for this.
Just like said: often you want to start with a simple setup, but this might change in the next 2 weeks.
A meteor based caching and whole-punching solution would be find. This is related to a topic I created a while ago SSR Rendering & wholepunching?
Meteor is a great tool for statics sites as well. Here is another link to my post, related to the approach I use for static sites6 build with Meteor.