#1 most frequent
United States of America
45.0%4,180 installations of 9,296
What is Jekyll?
Jekyll is an open source static site generator useful as a blog publishing system.
Categories & Use Cases
Who Buys & Uses Jekyll
#2 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
11.4%1,064 installations of 9,296
#3 most frequent
Germany
4.6%423 installations of 9,296
Jekyll is the Samurai sword of content management systems
Pros
- 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.
Return on Investment
- Jekyll has kept our costs low, very low, on all the projects I've used on it. Think $10 a year low.
Alternatives Considered
WordPress, Blogger and Umbraco CMS
Other Software Used
Chrome DevTools, Google Analytics, Google Drive
Simple yet powerful CMS with Jekyll
Pros
- Lightweight blogging framework
- Lots of support documentation
- Can host practically anywhere
Cons
- Complicated for non-technical users
- Can be difficult to enter in new content
- Implementing dynamic components can be challenging
Return on Investment
- Jekyll has improved our time to market in cases of new projects
- Jekyll has reduced the cost of hosting a website
Alternatives Considered
Drupal and WordPress
Other Software Used
GitHub, Bitbucket, Google Analytics
Efficient Static Site Generation
Pros
- Static site generation
- Dynamic templates
- Single-page applications
- Advanced, multi-page navigation and organization with template hierarchy
Cons
- 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
Return on Investment
- 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.
Alternatives Considered
WordPress
Jekyll is a great, fast alternative to a traditional CMS for developers
Pros
- Content stored in Git with the website code
- Free to use
- Easy to deploy to cheap/free hosting solutions
- Produces super fast static websites
Cons
- 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
Return on Investment
- 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
Alternatives Considered
WordPress and Drupal
Other Software Used
WordPress, Drupal