Learning out Loud in Milwaukee, WI

rePress: Jekyll with a WordPress Frontend

Note: I’m not maintaining this open source project anymore. There was a pretty cool reception to it and I didn’t have time to maintain it for just myself. I still think it’s a good idea, though. 🙂

About five months ago I left the riveting world of WordPress development for the greener pastures of helping a government startup manage its website, and while I’ve become pretty taken with Jekyll lately, there will always be a part of me that loves WordPress. And so, like a good hacker, I started a side project I’m calling rePress (a name that, admittedly, needs work—see below).

There have been a few different ways people have approached the task of marrying WordPress with static site generators. Ben Balter’s WordPress to Jekyll exporter is one that takes on Jekyll specifically, then there’s StaticPress, a plugin for WordPress that transforms your installation into a static site, and finally CFPB is taking on the task of building a static site generator that will pull from WordPress and other APIs. rePress takes a different tack but is inspired by these other initatives.

The first two of these solutions are WordPress plugins, and the second generates content from an API. This combines the two ideas by creating generator plugin for Jekyll sites that relies on the REST API currently being integrated into WordPress Core. Right now that API is only available as a plugin, but it will one day (soon, I think) require only a clean WordPress installation.

Once you have the API exposed, you need only point Jekyll to the root endpoint and run jekyll build on your server or your local environment. Right now it will grab the 9 most recent posts and parse out the published title, date, tags, authors, and excerpts, and, of course, the post content and generate HTML files with proper Jekyll frontmatter. This has a couple benefits: it allows you to import your WordPress posts without exporting any files and it allows you to choose whether to write Jekyll Markdown or use the WordPress editing interface.

It definitely has a long way to go, but it’s something I’ve been excited about creating pretty much since the REST API project was first announced. I’ll be pushing updates to GitHub, and would love any suggestions you have. In particular, I kind of hate the name I came up with, but all the original ideas like JekyllPress, StaticPress, and Hyde all mean other things related to Jekyll and WordPress. So here I am, with a name that means subdue by force which is not at all what this does or is intended to do. I’m open to name suggestions but know that it’ll probably change at some point.

Discuss on HackerNews.