Jekyll has become one of my favorite things lately. At 18F we’re using it to power our website but also our Hub project which includes serving up snippets, our weekly team updates submitted by Google Form, as well as a tremendous amount of information that is a mix of pages restricted to our team and some that is public. The Hub uses Prose to allow people less comfortable with GitHub and Markdown to edit Jekyll pages with something closer to a What you See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface than a typical markdown document has. Prose is a great tool, and I’m not just saying that because we use it. But for many static sites haven’t quite gone far enough, and that’s okay.
Early adopters like static sites a lot. People who bought one of the first Blackberries or used WordPress in 2006, for example, might like static site generators a lot. People who like Markdown or other markup languages enjoy static site generators. And some appreciate the simplicity of configuration found in static sites, especially the lack of a database. For many people like me it is a refreshing focus on writing without the complications of The Admin UI that have plagued even the best CMS platforms.
An example of these complications? I recently helped my wife with some settings on her blog and was reminded how confusing the WordPress Admin can be. Where do you think you should go to set your front page to display a page instead of latest posts? Settings > General? Settings > Writing? Settings > Media? The answer: None of the above. It’s Settings > Reading. I guess when I think about it that makes sense, you’re changing a setting that changes the experience for someone reading your site.
At the same time, there are still some things that a CMS does really well that static site generators
lack. At least to me, Jekyll’s simplicity is a feature that forces me to think about the value of, for example, a tag archive or automatic image formatting before implementing it. With a CMS these features are there waiting for you to use or extend. WordPress for example provides a really simple API to extend the WYSIWYG interface with ‘shortcodes.’ All of this comes in handy when you need to create a blog post with images floated left and right and center, or when building that tag archive (easy as it may
be) means taking away time from publishing real content.
If I’m not a developer, needing to become one or hire one just to start writing a blog post is a pretty high barrier to entry. Feeling like I need to become one just to write a blog post is even higher. The reason I became a developer in the first place was that in 2006 when I needed to reboot my college radio station’s website WordPress was insanely easy to install and configure and gave us almost everything we needed (with the right theme and plugins), and in 2009 when I built the first version of HarmsBoone.org and International Underground I didn’t need to learn much beyond CSS and a few WordPress methods. When I eventually needed to know more it was still a fairly low barrier to entry and we always had a website that everybody could edit. In particular, Child themeing is particularly useful for learning WordPress on the fly.
Static sites, for all their simplicies and technical advantages, still have a pretty high barrier to entry, especially if you need to overcome the limitations GitHub pages puts on Jekyll sites. And to be fair, WordPress has significant (read: 8-10 year) head start over Jekyll plus the entire WordPress Core and Automattic teams nurturing the developer base.
Nevertheless, without lowering that bar and adding some of those features it will be really hard to get broader adoption among people who want a Just Start Writing Already. For many, logging in to the WordPress Admin and using the WYSIWYG either to write or to paste in copied text will always be preferable to editing monospaced text with strange formatting signals around it, even if there are buttons to help them out. (Let’s not belittle the bar-lowering power or Prose, Dillinger, and other Markdown helpers, though, for some they may be exactly the right tool.)
It will remain preferable even if they rely on a bookmark in their browser, or an icon on their desktop to get them to the admin screen. Clicking “Preview” will be preferable to navigating to running a shell command and then heading to localhost:4000 because what’s a localhost? What’s that colon all about? And what’s so special about 4000? And clicking “Publish” will definitely be preferable over committing a git workflow to memory.
These are problems Static Site Generators can solve, and part of what makes them beautiful is how they are malleable to each user’s needs. And if you put
a developer on the comms team you’ll be able to build the site you need on the platform that works because you’ll ask your users what they need and how they work. If your users need to
copy and paste blog posts from Google Docs, give them that. If they want a WYSIWYG editor for writing and collaborating on posts, give them that. If the need the full WordPress UI, give them that. I’m not trying to sound flippant. Building a WYSIWYG on top of Jekyll would be a difficult problem, but it’s not
impossible. Using Google Drive as a CMS will also take work, it’s not impossible. Building GUI applications to abstract away the command line is difficult, but not impossible.
There are hundreds of content management
systems and static site generators operating on nearly every language in existence (including FORTRAN). And there are WordPress plugins for nearly everything imaginable at this point, and usually there are three of four of them to choose from. Your mileage will almost certainly vary from one solution to another but go with the solution that will make your content creators most comfortable.