Efficient Static Site Generation
Rating: 10 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
Jekyll is used as the static site generator for project documentation, user guides, and developer best practices explanations. We're using it both through GitHub's built-in Pages feature (which compiles Jekyll sites for us automatically) and locally for content and design staging before anything ever ships to production. Jekyll allows us to work on the content of a documentation site independent of the code that builds and hosts the content.
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
Likelihood to Recommend
Jekyll is very well-suited for static content that changes infrequently once it's been published. If the site is a blog or needs to generate dynamic content in response to requests (i.e. form builders or other dynamically-generated pages) a more interactive system would be preferable. Jekyll works best with a hosted solution like GitHub Pages or Elastic Beanstalk or something else where code/content can be deployed once, quickly, and left alone.