Jekyll - WordPress alternative?

badya122

badya122

Boot Camp
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Hi guys!

Does anyone have any experience running a website on Jekyll? It is basically a flat-file system (no databased, static pages).

Looking into advantages and disadvantages of using it for a niche site that will potentially sell later and wondering if it is worth it?

One great advantage of using Jekyll is that it is very fast and also fairly easy to use.
 
I can't add anything about Jekyll itself, but I'd definitely say that if you're planning on selling you might as well put it on Wordpress. In my experience, buyer's aren't technical at all. They are buying cashflow and want to be able to make their tweaks without becoming devs. They are buying the dream, not having to learn new skill sets.
 
Ryuzaki said:
I can't add anything about Jekyll itself, but I'd definitely say that if you're planning on selling you might as well put it on Wordpress. In my experience, buyer's aren't technical at all. They are buying cashflow and want to be able to make their tweaks without becoming devs. They are buying the dream, not having to learn new skill sets.
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That is what I was thinking. Thanks Ryuzaki!
 
On the dev-op side, if you're familiar with the command line and Ruby, Jekyll is a very powerful static site generator. The code it generates is code you can hand off to someone to continue development on, with or without Jekyll. Being that it's a static site generator, the web server isn't going to care whether the site was made by Jekyll, Pico, etc.

Advantages: You can create reusable headers, footers, layouts, code snippets, etc so you don't have to, for example, put the same header on every single page via copy/paste. There is quite a bit of flexibility built in with plugins that allow you to use things like sass, less, slim, coffeescript, etc. So you can write your sass/less CSS code, use coffeescript for the JavaScript and Jekyll will generate the correct CSS/JS files for you and even minify for an even bigger speed boost (not much but still). The documentation on the Jekyll site is pretty detailed and concise.

Static sites are blazing fast, mostly because you don't have the overhead of firing up a PHP/Perl/Ruby interpreter, running it through line after line of code, talking to a database then spitting out a page.

Disadvantages: The main thing that comes to mind to me is that, depending on the person's experience with sysadmin tasks involving the command line, Ruby/Jekyll can be a bit confusing to install and get everything set up for someone new to UNIX style systems such as Linux or Mac OS and shells like bash and zsh (zsh = <3). Jekyll itself has a pretty steep learning curve to be able to get the most out of it. Like @Ryuzaki said, it wouldn't be a prime candidate for something you'd want to hand over to someone with unknown skill level. For your own sites where you want that extra shot of nitro? I'd say go for it.

I like Jekyll myself and it's great for what it does. I work with Ruby (and Rails) quite a bit and have for a long time (2003 for Ruby, 2005 for Rails) so having a static site generator in Ruby is the perfect fit for me. YMMV
 
You might want to take look at grav flat file system. They have an Admin panel for front and back end changes a little bit like WordPress.
 
Goldorak said:
You might want to take look at grav flat file system. They have an Admin panel for front and back end changes a little bit like WordPress.
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I actually started playing with grav a while ago, but found it a little more complicated than jekyll in terms of making an actual custom design website. But plugins that they offer is great, and perhaps wouldn't even be that bad for a flip, since you can make new posts just like in WordPress.
 
I'm using Python/Pelican for static sites. I've just started, and I'm about to launch a few affiliate/lead-gen sites as a test. Using NginX on a small Digital Ocean droplet they're pretty damn fast.

The main PITA with Wordpress is updates, security vulnerabilities etc. When you're running 30-40 installs of Wordpress it can be hell when something breaks.
 
If your intention is to flip the site, use Wordpress.

If you are trying to build a freelancing business and if you are marketing yourself as a Python/Ruby developer, having a Pelican/Jekyll site makes sense.
 
I'm going to start using grav today. Really impressed with what they've done and it's much easier to get it up and running that jekyll.
 
I've been using Pelican -- which is sort of like Jekyll, but Python based. I like it for the typical affiliate sites, where you don't really need the backend that Wordpress provides.
 
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