I'm searching for a way to make our website more manageable, and I've heard that svnpubsub will allow us to quickly update our website (faster than currently). The snag is that the files need to be in a svn repo.
As I hate xml for editing documents, I was looking for a decent replacement. Having worked with markdown (or textile), these plain text formats are really nice to work in and deliver quick results. Next I was looking for a CMS that would generate static HTML as required for a migration to svnpubsub. The ruby tool 'jekyll' seems to work great: we can have a couple of templates, blog items, and it is all quickly generated, so anyone with ruby (or possibly jruby) installed can update the website. I've created a temporary github project to experiment with jekyll and a new Wicket site design. The site design is a matter of another vote thread. In this discussion/vote I want to ensure that the way forward is jekyll. If you are wondering if jekyll is something for us, try it with the github project and convert a couple of pages and release notes from our wicket website. I've converted two examples, and created the quickstart page. When you look at the site, it is a bit of a hodgepodge since the front page and getting started pages are not Markdown based, but rather HTML based. This was done because I needed more flexibility in the rendered markup rather than have speed in editing content (such as is the case with the examples). The main plus points I see with Jekyll are: * flexible * generates static markup * easy to grok * easy to extend * easy to use as a CMS I haven't found stuff I didn't like (yet). For example, to update the website to a new release, all we need to do is modify the _config.yml and let jekyll regenerate all pages. We could even add that to the release script :) Creating release notes should be easier too (I find markdown syntax to be really easy to grok) So what do you think, is jekyll the way forward (I'll put up the design in a separate discussion)? Martijn PS. This is not about replacing the WIKI with something else... Just the Wicket website generator. PPS. No we won't be able to use Wicket as a front end for the Wicket website. Websites need to be static HTML in order to meet infra@ requirements of scalability and availability. PPPS. Yes theoretically we could write a static website generator using Wicket, however we need a new CMS quickly rather than eventually, so I'd rather use existing software than something imaginary.
