Moving back from to Jekyll to Wordpress
February 5, 2014
Recently, we did a soft launch of our website after it went over a complete revamp. Our revamped website is built on WordPress.
We were using Jekyll to power our website for the past year or so and back then we had shared our experience with Jekyll in this blog post - Our experience with Jekyll and Octopress.
Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator that gives you a clear advantage in performance. Also, it comes with a powerful combination of Ruby, Templating and YAML which makes it a very attractive option for creating websites especially if you are a software development firm using Ruby. So, why did we move back to WordPress?
The Reasons:
Editing
One of the major drawbacks in using Jekyll based websites lies in content editing. Posts or Pages should be written in markdown, textile, or HTML and may also contain Liquid templating syntax. Writing content will be like writing code which the programmers don't mind, but definitely not appealing for a non-technical person.
And, it involves a lot more work like manually managing images, copying metadata from an existing post to a new post, then changing that metadata etc. Prose.io is a great step forward for content editing in Jekyll powered sites even though it’s limited to Github repositories.
Publishing
You can't publish content from anywhere, unless you have the code with you or have deployment setup like Travis or Jenkins with which you can deploy from anywhere. With WordPress you can write content and publish from anywhere.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
With Jekyll, you need to take care of search engine optimization (SEO) entirely on your own. WordPress and its themes are well designed from a SEO point of view. Plus there are plugins available which can further improve the SEO performance of the site.
Managed Platform for WordPress
Now, with Managed WordPress Host like WP Engine, performance, maintenance and security are taken care for you. Some of the features of WP Engine we found very useful are:
One-Click Staging
On click of a button it takes a snapshot of the live website and copies it to a "staging area" where you can test your changes without affecting your live site. So, this adds a layer of safety before doing something risky like upgrading plugins.
Performance
WP Engine takes care of your site's speed. They make sure your site loads as fast as possible.
Daily Backups
They automatically back up your site every day and you can restore it easily with a few clicks.
Conclusion
At the end of the day if collaborating for creating, editing and publishing content is important for you then it is important for you to choose a tool or technology that will help make that process simple and efficient.
In that respect I feel WordPress definitely does a great job. And, WP Engine helped us further bolster our decision .
Of course its only been a few days since we launched our new site - so, please do look forward to seeing an update from me [right here] - in a few months from now.
References*http://www.multunus.com/blog/2012/10/our-experience-with-jekyll-and-octopress/