I’m currently involved in a community project and I installed a wordpress. From time to time I get one up to see how it evolves. But really this thing is not to my taste. To much trouble for making simple things. I reckon it can be useful for people with no technical knowledge but then they are going to mess up everything. The technical advisor still can’t be avoided.

So because now I saw a recent wordpress and didn’t like it more than the previous attempts, I will give a try to the new octopress 3.0. The octopress author explains that he’s been doing it all wrong and now on version 3.0 he gets back to sort of a collection of gems that plug into jekyll. I kind of like the idea.

Well to be honest I was also tempted to give a try to phoenix, but I know jekyll already and I don’t have that much server resources for that community project. Static web always have had my preference. But the idea behind Phoenix is appealing. Like any new project it includes the new things and don’t have to bother about legacy. The channels ideas, creating a stream between client and server, sounds very appealing.

But to get back to why I will prefer jekyll over wordpress, is that my contributors are a mess. They don’t care about styling, they copy-paste random html all over the place and the final look is totally inconsistent. My hope is that markdown would limit the possibilities of making a mess. But then I will have to propose them the github edit, as a backend, unless I cheat and use etherpad-lite as a pre-production backend.

That etherpad-lite thing is amazingly simple, I used sometimes and making it accessible behind a single password for everybody makes tings pretty direct. But totally unsafe, I reckon. I will probably have to write some kind of tool for managing the publication workflow. Hmm, that sounds like fun. If you ever had the same kind of adventure, please share with me :)