Puppetbestpractices.com Hurdle Number One

As I start to get things in order for puppetbestpractices.com, I am stuck on a relatively big decision, how do I setup the site? I basically see this two options:

  1. I setup WordPress and grab a pretty theme and some plugins.
  2. I take a bit more time and setup the site using a static page generator like Jekyll.

The first aspect that makes the decision hard is collaboration. If I use Jekyll or some other static site generator, I can throw the page up on GitHub and anyone that wants to contribute can just create a pull request. This makes contributions super simple. WordPress has the opposite problem. The only way I can accept contributions is to get emails and comments, or to hand out accounts. Neither of of those options are appealing.

From there the question of design comes into play. I almost titled this post “Design Eye for the SysAdmin Guy” because I suck so hard at it. IMHO, WordPress is the clear winner in this battle. It has tons of free and easy to use themes etc. Jekyll or maybe even Octopress have a much more limited selection of themes and by and large require me to actually know what I am doing, which, as I mentioned before is not the case. If the themes from something like Themeforest made sense from a license standpoint, I would gladly pay the roughly $15 bucks for a starting point.

So yeah, this has been my frustration since PuppetConf, how to build the site. I guess this is just a reminder that anything worth doing is going to be hard.