Finding a UI for Jekyll

[kremalicious]

Goal: provide a basic visual workflow for editing copy including a preview of changes before they go live.

I came across https://forestry.io which looks nice & simple and seems perfect for our use case. Just creates form fields for all keys/values it can find in existing YAML frontmatter and handles images nicely with a drag & drop interface. Also handles all post types nicely so we could also use it for the new blog functionality. And it's free for up to 10 users.

forestry.io example:

Body copy is still written in markdown but with nice highlighting:

@shemtovo could you please add bigchain-website to forestry.io, then add me as a Team member there?

ToDo

• [x] add bigchain-website to Forestry.io
• [x] define and set file & image upload paths under site settings
• [x] get preview to work
• [x] test publishing workflow
  • [x] create a new page
  • [x] add text, add an image
  • [x] save & commit
  • [x] verify changes end up on live

Remaining thing is getting preview to work there which is a bit more tricky. The preview works but no styles/javascripts are loaded resulting in unstyled page.

All those »UI-on-top-of-jekyll« services depend on the standard Ruby-based Jekyll assets pipeline so in the end all those services just do a jekyll serve to show the preview. But this Jekyll assets pipeline has many limitations, which is why we use Gulp to handle the assets processing.

My strategy right now is to provide a basic set of styles in the standard _saas folder for Jekyll to process when doing a jekyll serve. It's fine when resulting css files are not super optimized as opposed to running through the Gulp-based build, it's just for preview purposes anyway.

Alternatives

• Siteleaf, is just weird, way too opinionated and they change almost all files upon first connection and in the end nothing worked in my tests
• BowTie.io, similar to Siteleaf with all its problems
• only locally: jekyll-admin, might have the same problem as forestry.io, fully depending on Jekyll assets pipeline

[kremalicious]

Ok, #76 should make it possible to use the site together with forestry.io.

@shemtovo were you able to add the site to forestry.io yet?