sitepress VS Bridgetown

If you are a Ruby or Rails dev, I built https://sitepress.cc/ to run stand-alone, embedded in Rails, or as a static site compiler.

It’s MIT licensed so anybody can use it, including people affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.

I'm currently facing the same problem - adding a blog to a Rails app.

I thought Sitepress looks interesting, as its supposed to integrate with Rails. Have you given that one a try?

https://sitepress.cc/

I’ve been down this path enough times that I built https://sitepress.cc/, which lets you embed content in a rails app with features that are present in Jekyll, Middleman, etc. like Frontmatter, site hierarchy traversal, etc. It keeps content as files in the app/content directory, but when it’s time to pull data in from the Rails app for SEO, it’s all right there in the Rails app. There’s no “Headless CMS” crap to jump through.

For me, this is another way of keeping everything in a monolith, and which requires a lot less context switching. If I’m building a feature and I want to create marketing or support content for it, it’s all right there in the same repo. I just create the markdown files I need, commit them to the repo, and I’m don.

The thought of switching between a static content site or something like Webflow just seems silly. I think they only makes sense for huge teams.

In case you want something like Middleman (frontmatter, static compilation, ...), but embedable in your Rails app, Sitepress is really cool solution (you can even run it without Rails!): https://sitepress.cc

I went the opposite direction and built a static site generator on top of Rails: https://sitepress.cc/

Turns out, Rails is a really good web framework! I tried building Sitepress on something “light weight”, Tilt and Rack, and it was a pain. I found myself constantly solving the same problems that were already solved in Rails. At some point it dawned on me that I could just build on top of a few parts of Rails, so I did. I wrote about it at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/single-file-rails-app/

I’m glad I did! Now I can plug all of the Rails template handlers, view components, and other Rails plugins into it and ride off that entire communities docs.

If you find yourself thinking, “rails is too heavy”, consider shedding the parts of Rails that you don’t need. Then as your application grows in complexity and you find yourself needing more parts of Rails, bring it back in.

As I was building Sitepress (a site generator like Middleman, Jekyll, & Bridgetown), I stumbled into the idea that a Rails application can exist in a single file and wrote about it at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/single-file-rails-app/.

Agreed. I built https://sitepress.cc/ that uses git + files to manage content in Rails, but it needs an editor.

I’m not sure if the right thing to do is build a web editor or smooth out git workflows so that non-technical people can open content files with desktop software to make changes to the content.

I created https://sitepress.cc/ because you can have both! It can run a dynamic content site from a Rails app or it can compile out pages that can be deployed to any static website host.

It doesn’t have a front end for authoring pages, styles, etc, but that could be built on top of this library.

Jekyll is a simplistic framework for static websites that originally sparked the static website and JAMstack movements. While there are many similar frameworks with more features, Jekyll remains one of the simplest on the market. It has been somewhat forgotten and hasn't evolved much lately, to the point where some people decided to take matters into their own hands and fork this framework into something called Bridgetown.

I use https://www.bridgetownrb.com/ and it works pretty well. Very easy to use and deploy. Blog posts are listing line by line, like "index". I didn't customize much from the generated code(only logo and header). You can take a look: ruzig.com

I'm using bridgetown because I like sitting on the bleeding edge, its basically a newer Jekyll which I would recommend checking out too. Bridgetown has a great modern dev experience but its missing some of the ecosystem from Jekyll. Not a problem for me because I'm really comfortable with Ruby.

If you want to have a different UI or your blog to look in a very specific way I recommend using Jekyll or Bridgetown.

If I wanted to post a simple website today I would look into Jekyll. There are a ton of articles and answers to common questions etc. It itself is written in Ruby but using it will not likely help you to learn Ruby. One-step in the direction of learning Ruby and getting a simple website could be Bridgetown. This will start you down a path of learning Ruby and not Rails. We use Bridgetown for our company site at Flagrant.

In the Hotwire Turbo world specifically, several discussions about integrating transition animations also took place and a few promising approaches emerged, namely the Turn project or the transitions in Bridgetown. There is also a chapter in the Noel Rappin’s Modern Front-End book and an interesting article but overall, frankly, this topic still fells somewhat early-stage and exploratory.

https://www.bridgetownrb.com/ static site generator. Can be linked with prism of you want a kind of panel to add new articles.

FYI. I used Bridgetown as a static site generator recently and rather enjoyed it. https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown.