When I first started working on the Jenkins website, then called by a different name, I selected Drupal, an extensible content management system, to get the job done. Like Jenkins itself, Drupal is easy to set up, install plugins and authoring content is done in a web UI. For the past seven years Drupal has served us well, but it is time to move on to something better suited for our needs.
The general requirements for something newer were:
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Easy to edit and create content
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Changes to content should be tracked and reviewable
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Any Jenkins contributor should be able to participate
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Support mixed content types
The consensus was that a statically-generated site, with raw content hosted on GitHub, would meet the majority of the "ease-of-use" type requirements. The remainder could be addressed depending on the implementation. A couple of years ago I tried to rebuild the site with static content using Jekyll, commonly used by GitHub Pages, but the effort stalled as I ran into challenges with the mixture of content types we need to manage (stories, events, pages, people, etc).
Having recently discovered Awestruct, a more versatile and sophisticated static-site generator that powers sites like asciidoctor.org, I ventured down that path.
To make a long story short, over the holiday break I finally pulled the trigger
and switched jenkins-ci.org over to the new site. In fact, the page you’re
reading right now was authored and published via our new
jenkins static site.
If you look at the bottom left-hand corner of this page there is a link titled "Improve this page" which will take you directly to GitHub to edit this post!
We have many more improvements to come for the Jenkins website, which are
tracked
in JIRA, but for now I invite members of the Jenkins community to help curate,
correct and create new blog posts and pages for jenkins-ci.org!
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R. Tyler Croy
R. Tyler Croy has been part of the Jenkins project for the past seven years. While avoiding contributing any Java code, Tyler is involved in many of the other aspects of the project which keep it running, such as this website, infrastructure, governance, etc. |