This is a presentation provided by Shaun D. Ellis of Princeton University Library for a NISO Training Thursday, held on February 25, 2016.

1. GitHub as CMS
A Case Study : Code4Lib 2016 Conference

2. Static Sites: Back to the Future!
Tim Berners-Lee's original static site.

3. Major Corporations are using Static Sites

4. 2015 Code4Lib Conference Site

5. 2016 Code4Lib Conference Site

6. Our Goals
● Empower all members of the community to contribute to the development and
content of the site
● Bring the performance, design, and user experience up to modern expectations
● Gather structured data for workshops, proposals, speakers, testimonials, even
gatherings
● Use the code4lib.org domain to add authority to the site
● Host the site for free, with low maintenance
● Attract potential sponsors

7. Benefits of Static Sites

8. Staffing and Collaboration
● Easier to recruit developers who know HTML, CSS, and JS fundamentals than
niche, CMS-specific developers
● Built-in version control (with GitHub Pages)
● Notifications (with GitHub Pages)
● Rollback or Revert unwanted changes
● Moderation and Editing

9. Performance
● Complexity of “dynamic” sites comes with big performance hit
● Scaling a “dynamic” site can be expensive
● Hard for “dynamic” sites to meet speed expectations for mobile browsing

10. Security
● By conservative estimates, 70% of today’s WordPress installations are vulnerable
to known exploits (and WordPress powers more than a quarter of the entire web)
● Just about a year ago 12 million Drupal sites needed emergency patches to be
applied within 7 hours of the announcement
● Keeping a dynamic CMS patched can start to feel like a game of …

11. What keeping a CMS patched looks like…
Photo credit: TPapi

12. GitHub Pages + Jekyll Benefits
● Free Hosting with Custom Domains
● kramdown: Simple, Flexible Markup
● Extensible via Plugins
● Structured Data via YAML

13. Structured Data Example

14. Divergences from CMS conventions

15. Editorial Process

16. Search

17. “Microservice” approach to most site features
The Static Site approach is more piecemeal than many CMS packages offer, relying on
third-party services. See the Jekyll tips site for solutions to these needs and more:
● Newsletters
● Analytics
● Content Editing
● Media / Embeddable Content
● Community / Commentary
● Forms
● Backends

18. Results of our Experiment?
● Bring the performance, design, and UX up to modern expectations… check!
● Use the code4lib.org domain to add authority to the site… check!
● Host the site for free… check!
● Attract potential sponsors… with over $100K in sponsorships we doubled our
target goal and far surpassed all previous conferences. That’s a check!
● Empower all members of the community to contribute to the development and
content of the site… well, mostly a check. We could have made it easier.
● Gather structured data for workshops, proposals, speakers, testimonials, even
gatherings…. check… but it wasn’t trivial.

19. Challenges
● HTTPS

20. Challenges
● HTTPS
● Jekyll Versions (Prod and Dev environment syncing)

21. Challenges
● HTTPS
● Jekyll Versions (Prod and Dev environment syncing)
● Dynamic Content
○ Usability problems and technical barriers for user-generated content
○ Solution: Google Forms/Spreadsheets + Tabletop.js
○ Many caveats!
■ Short-Term Reliability
■ Long-Term Reliability
■ Payload “weight”
■ Editing flexibility
■ Obfuscation

22. Jekyll Templates for Various Content Types
● Documentation Theme: A Jekyll doc theme for designers
● staticAid: A site generator for Archival Description
● Ed: a Jekyll theme for producing beautifully rendered scholarly or reading
editions of texts
● Freelancer: A Jekyll theme to showcase a portfolio

23. Beyond GitHub Pages: Other Generators and Platforms
● Free Static Hosting
○ Surge.sh
■ Great for more “dynamic” Native Web Apps (Isomorphic JavaScript)
■ Use GitHub, Contentful, or a custom MongoDB + Express.js as a data store
■ HTTPS available for custom domains!
● Generators
○ Middleman
○ Roots
● Some User-friendly Content Editors
○ Prose.io - uses GitHub’s API
○ Dillinger.io

24. Should I use GitHub Pages?

25. You have real-time data-driven content
coming from outside your institution.

26. You have real-time data-driven content
coming from outside your institution.

27. … but it’s worth considering for most
other web-based publishing needs.

28. Thank you.
Shaun Ellis
Digital Collections User Interface Developer
Princeton University Library
@sdellis