Jekyll is a great, fast alternative to a traditional CMS for developers
At my organization, we currently use Jekyll on my team as an easy way to publish our style guide and pattern library. The Jekyll site gets …
Jekyll
Jekyll
Jekyll
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What is Jekyll?
Jekyll is an open source static site generator useful as a blog publishing system.
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What is Jekyll?
Jekyll is an open source static site generator useful as a blog publishing system.
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What is Jekyll?
Jekyll is an open source static site generator useful as a blog publishing system.
Jekyll Technical Details
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At my organization, we currently use Jekyll on my team as an easy way to publish our style guide and pattern library. The Jekyll site gets deployed automatically through GitHub pages. I use Jekyll personally for a portfolio website, also deployed through GitHub Pages. I also have used Netlify for publishing Jekyll sites in the past.
- Content stored in Git with the website code
- Free to use
- Easy to deploy to cheap/free hosting solutions
- Produces super fast static websites
- Not easy to update for non-developers
- No server-side language to support things like contact forms, so 3rd party software/service is needed
- Ruby gems can get messy
- It's free with GitHub Pages, so it cost us nothing to use
- It's tied into GitHub, so deploying changes is super easy (as opposed to deploying elsewhere)
- Keeps all content together with the code, so only one place to maintain information
The big alternatives to Jekyll are of course things like WordPress or Drupal, but they are almost something completely different: a full-blown CMS with a backend language and a database. Jekyll loses some of the niceties of these CMS solutions, like easily updating content from a user interface, but Jekyll will have much better performance by not having to render pages server-side or get content from a database.
I've also looked into (but not tried) several other Jekyll alternatives, such as Hugo, Middleman, and Pelican. Ultimately I decided on Jekyll because of it's ease of use with GitHub.
I've also looked into (but not tried) several other Jekyll alternatives, such as Hugo, Middleman, and Pelican. Ultimately I decided on Jekyll because of it's ease of use with GitHub.
January 17, 2018
Simple yet powerful CMS with Jekyll
We use Jekyll as a basic content management system framework for building basic, static, (and mostly freely hosted) websites. Generally the websites are either small prototypes, landing pages for new products or something new we're launching, or even as a basic blogging platform for one of our community driven technology sites. Jekyll helps you get up and running very quickly with a bare bones blog enabled site.
- Lightweight blogging framework
- Lots of support documentation
- Can host practically anywhere
- Complicated for non-technical users
- Can be difficult to enter in new content
- Implementing dynamic components can be challenging
- Jekyll has improved our time to market in cases of new projects
- Jekyll has reduced the cost of hosting a website
Jekyll has a much lower technical overhead in terms of server and hosting requirements to launch a site, but at the same time has a much more technical "interface" and doesn't have the dynamic capability, user management, or permission system as a standard CMS like Drupal or WordPress already has baked in.
October 20, 2017
Jekyll is the Samurai sword of content management systems
I used Jekyll at two previous organizations. The first was a non-profit college where I used Jekyll to keep costs down. The second was a small web development firm where I used Jekyll to speed development of the company's portfolio website. Jekyll is great for both purposes. Jekyll allowed me to keep costs low for the college I worked for by hosting it for free on GitHub.com along with a custom domain. Jekyll allowed me to speed development at the web firm by allowing me to work very close to the front-end technologies I'm expert in, without having to fiddle with other people's layers in between. The other advantage we reaped at the web firm was how easy it is to build a screaming-fast Jekyll website, since the entire site ends up as a static site, which is great for a website meant to show off your web development skill.
- Jekyll is a joy to use for people who aren't intimidated by HTML, CSS, and Markdown. It gets out of your way, giving you the power to build a website that would be a pain to build in straight HTML, but without imposing the needless complexity so many other CMS's bolt on.
- Jekyll sites tend to be extremely fast, and can be made even faster with very little effort on the webmaster's part. All you're serving are static assets.
- A big advantage of Jekyll is the ability to check in your entire site, content and all, into version control. You never have to worry about upgrading your site and losing your content. It's all backed up in GitHub, or any other git hosting you choose to use.
- Jekyll sites can be run at near-zero costs. Host it for free on GitHub Pages, and the only expense you have left is a domain name, about $10 a year.
- You can do most things with Jekyll you'd think would require a database and CMS. Blogging comes built in. Comments, contact forms, and many other common features can be embedded into your site from another service. With a little clever programming, most sites really don't need the complexity and speed impediments of a database.
- Straight out of the box, Jekyll lacks a friendly WordPress-style back-end. You'll be working in Liquid (HTML), Sass (CSS), and Markdown (content) files. If you're already comfortable with these languages, you'll feel at home in no time. If not, you may need to consider getting someone else's expertise to set up the site, and then use another back-end (probably paid) to make editing your site's files less intimidating.
- If you use GitHub Pages for the free hosting, be forewarned that GitHub only white lists a few plugins for their own compilation. This usually isn't a problem (you can compile on your own computer if need be), but can be annoying at times.
- Jekyll has kept our costs low, very low, on all the projects I've used on it. Think $10 a year low.
- WordPress, Blogger and Umbraco CMS
All the other CMS's I've used try to make it easy for the nontechnical user to manage a website, at the expense of adding complexity and weight to the system. Jekyll takes the exact opposite approach, eschewing all unnecessary complexity. If you know what you're doing in a code editor, Jekyll will probably feel like a breath of fresh air to you.
August 03, 2017
Efficient Static Site Generation
Jekyll is used as the static site generator for project documentation, user guides, and developer best practices explanations. We're using it both through GitHub's built-in Pages feature (which compiles Jekyll sites for us automatically) and locally for content and design staging before anything ever ships to production. Jekyll allows us to work on the content of a documentation site independent of the code that builds and hosts the content.
- Static site generation
- Dynamic templates
- Single-page applications
- Advanced, multi-page navigation and organization with template hierarchy
- Ease of local usage (Ruby isn't always the friendliest environment, especially on Windows)
- Up-to-date documentation on configuration for edge cases and plugins
- All of our documentation is now centralized to one, version controlled location and presented seamlessly. Engineers don't have to spend hours trolling through a wiki or sorting Google Pages to find the information they need.
- Because Jekyll sites are fully-fledged websites, sometimes the _design_ of a document can overwhelm the interest of the team maintaining it - they'll spend more time perfecting the look/feel than they should.
Jekyll is integrated into GitHub Pages, which made it an easy choice. Using Jekyll was also easier as there's not really a server or a database to configure and you can just get things started from day one. Running and verifying content changes locally for developers is super efficient as Jekyll runs locally, too.