Quartz vs Digital Garden Plugin?

Help
1

First, search the help docs and this forum. Maybe your question has been answered! The debugging steps can help, too. Still stuck? Delete this line and proceed.

What I’m trying to do

Setting up a digital garden like website on private webspace

Things I have tried

Searched “digital garden” in the forum and looked for decently recent entries. Not much found.

Hello all, :deciduous_tree:

although it seems the idea died out some years ago, currently I’d like to setup a digital garden like website from my obsidian notes. I have a domain and webspace for that, so I do not rely on other external hosters. However:

I am not sure whether to use the Digital Garden Plugin or go with Quarz. Kann someone who has some experience with them, tell the main differences?

Ofcourse I’m also open for other solutions, but these two seemed to be the most fitting. However I found it hard to decide for one over the other and I am afraid I might miss out on a certain feature I might not think about in advance. I did some research, but I find it a little hard to get into the tiny details that might matter.

Key aims:

  • automatically detect changes in my notes and update the static-site files (so that I then can make them upload automatically)
  • do not publish all notes, but only chosen ones (not sure yet, whether I want to run a separate vault)
  • do not generate dead links (to unpublished private notes), or at least not ending up in a general 404 and indistinguishable for the user. (I would be fine though, to setup a distinct page or similar for dead links)
  • as much influence on the appearance and elements of the output website via (mainly) HTML/CSS as possible

In the end I might just have to try both, but I hoped someone would have already done that and might be willing to point out some issues/features that differ.

Thank you in advance! :upside_down_face:

.tZ :lemon:

2

My assumption is that setting up the DG template is more user-friendly starting out (never used Quartz) and as your condifence grows you can customize stuff in it to your liking.
Ole’s DG plugin and template support Excalidraw and plantUML, which was a plus for me.

If you create a local test project, you can make a workspace out of it for a Visual Studio Code chatbot or a Windsurf (now Devin) chatbot, a Trae chatbot (etc.) and ask your robot about structure: in which folders and files to put your custom stuff (a theme switcher, etc.). I am guessing it would be similar with Quartz.

Some css snippets have to go into scss files, some can go into css, depending on priority needed (which files are read first by the template).

DG is still maintained-ish, meaning every 3-4 months some changes may happen and in the meantime you may have wanted to change code to customize to your liking, to your language. I had to freeze my own DG version and take off on my own.

As I have a larger vault I never got to use the DG publish center command so I had to add my own date modified and publish properties and used Dataview (Js) and now Datacore plugins to query what needs to be republished. So streamlining the experience took a bit of work but now with more able bots you can work things out faster and smooth things out as you go along.