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Real World Content Strategy with Jekyll

Real World Content Strategy with Jekyll

for JekyllConf 2016

Bud Parr

May 07, 2016
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  1. • Links to articles, tutorials, presentations • Events • Original

    Articles • Showcase of Interesting Use-cases • Opinionated list of tools and resources • Job Board (soon!) {static is} The New Dynamic
  2. Why wouldn’t anyone want their site to be… • Faster

    • More secure • Really efficient to build
  3. –Eric Gunderson, Development Seed, 2013 “It's Called Jekyll, and It

    Works” “Good morning tech pundits! The main HealthCare.gov landing page and the thousands of subpages that educate the public on Affordable Care Act insurance are powered by Jekyll. This portion of the website has experienced 100% uptime and has functioned perfectly since we launched it in June. The site and our approach is all part of how we build CMS free websites.”
  4. 18F

  5. –Dave Cole, 2012 “We pushed the boundaries of what we

    could do with these standards and avoided building server applications at all costs. As a result, we were able to build some of our best work.”
  6. –Bruce Lee “The height of cultivation runs to simplicity. It

    is not the daily increase but daily decrease —  hack away the unessentials!”
  7. Enhancements since 2014 • Collections in 2.0: not just a

    blogging framework any longer. • Build-time improvements, 3.0 • Gem-based themes • New Tags/Filters (help minimize for loops): ‘slug,’ ‘where expression’ • Growing Ecosystem
  8. Four Pillars of a Website Make life easy for these

    people and everybody wins content creators designers/ developers site owners end-user audience
  9. Goals for Content Creators • Logical Structure: Will they “get”

    it or will they need a manual to figure it out? • Keep things in as few “buckets” as possible. • Be Dry: Don’t Repeat Yourself. • Reduce opportunities for error. content creators
  10. • Contributors collection: • name (for main, and each book

    for translators, etc.) • mage • image credit • banner image • bio • tagline • Posts, if any related • Events collection, only if any coming up • Books collection • title • cover • category (fiction, etc) • was it translated? • related translator, related editor, related contributor • synopsis • message • editions available • links to purchase • Reviews collection (on some pages) • Genre (yaml, in config)
  11. _authors _editors _translators _contributors name image bio similar attributes ranslators

    authors edrs ributors Go in the same They’re all people
  12. The Importance of Experimentation One thing that Jekyll does really

    well is allow us to experiment with our content structure.
  13. • A text-based system is much faster to iterate on

    than wrangling forms in the back-end of a CMS. • And, because every bit of our site, including the content, is in version control, it's quite easy to create an entirly new version of the site, experiment, and throw up a staging copy for review and either fold that work in or discard it. Build & Iterate
  14. Where Jeyll really shines is how it lets us use

    content however it best suits the content, not the system.
  15. If all you need is a list, use a list

    genres: - Fiction - Poetry - Nonfiction - Theater YAML is both human readable and computationally powerful
  16. Jekyll Core Concept Collections may or may not map to

    a URL. Don’t think of them as pages, but merely objects, structured as documents for the convenience of editing.
  17. So we've gone from a simple text document, to an

    item holding multi-faceted data with dates, images, relationships.