Indeed! While I learned a lot from Rails' because of how it prescribes a certain structure and approach, the size of it all and the 'magic' that hid a lot of (important) detail was probably suboptimal.
Now I'd been building websites for a while, so I'd already gone organically through the whole 'hey let's use php to cut my pages up into reusable modules', 'I can automate this thing here', 'plugins are awesome!', and 'hey what's this MVC thing'.
But for people starting from less, a static site generator might be more explicit and less complex to learn with.
The mere fact that there's often a 'build' step that converts your stuff to plain html, javascript and css, I find, makes beginners feel like they understand things a little better.
Now I'd been building websites for a while, so I'd already gone organically through the whole 'hey let's use php to cut my pages up into reusable modules', 'I can automate this thing here', 'plugins are awesome!', and 'hey what's this MVC thing'.
But for people starting from less, a static site generator might be more explicit and less complex to learn with.
The mere fact that there's often a 'build' step that converts your stuff to plain html, javascript and css, I find, makes beginners feel like they understand things a little better.