The Future of Jekyll

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Hey everyone. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s possible you may not have heard…the lead/release maintainer of Jekyll, Frank Taillandier, recently and unexpectedly passed away.

How does this affect Jekyll, and the future of such a high-profile open source project? That is up for debate. I’ve written a detailed article about it and my thoughts are pretty clear. If you think “RIP Jekyll” is overly dramatic…well, I’m sorry to say this but that was Frank’s direct quote, not mine. (What?!)

I know it sounds incredibly self-serving for me to talk about this since I run the Bridgetown project which is a Jekyll fork and technically its closest competitor at this point—and honestly that’s why I waited several months to summon the courage to talk about this openly. As the article states, I adored Jekyll. I loved it so much I built a business around it, as much others have over the years. It’s sad to witness its demise. But my love letter to Jekyll is Bridgetown, and I hope through Bridgetown the ethos of Jekyll that drew us all to it in the first place can live on. Despite the sad news, the future of Ruby on the Jamstack is bright indeed.

If you have any questions about this news or what it means for us to provide an upgrade path for Jekyll users to migrate to Bridgetown, please let me know here or over in the Bridgetown GitHub discussions or Discord chat (links on the website).

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Hi Jared,
Do you have any plans to release teaching videos for Bridgetown? That might really help the Noobs to get started using it. Some people learn better by watching videos as opposed to just reading instructions.

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Plans, yes…time, hard to come by! But indeed it’d be very helpful to have additional education resources (video & written guide) around how to migrate a project, and I’m hoping to get that going soon.

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I mentioned on the Bridgetown Discord channel already, that Brad Traversy https://www.traversymedia.com/ would be a wonderful teacher for Bridgetown videos. He is very easy to listen to, and explains things in simple terms that even a 5th grader would understand. Maybe, if enough people requested a video tutorial on Bridgetown, he might consider it. It can’t hurt to ask!

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Hi Jared. I’ve just come across Bridgetown and I’m very impressed. It’s what I have been looking for a better way for npm to play nice with Jekyll. I was actually seriously looking at migrating my Jekyll site to 11ty but I think I’m going to give Bridgetown a try :smile: . Have you written a migration path tutorial from Jekyll to Bridgetown? Also have you considered using Vite over webpack?