Jekyll is the Samurai sword of content management systems
Rating: 10 out of 10
October 20, 2017
NA
Vetted Review
Verified User
2 years of experience
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.
Cons
- 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.