Rationale

Wiki ▸ Rationale

PRU website (source and deployment) is based on the following principles:

• usefulness of version control (for own safety and collaboration)
• use static generated site (do we really need any web server?)
• use of open source

We then decided to:

• use Jekyll as static site generator. (And make use of the vast amount of plugins that help to ease site production or make a site nicer and/or more useful. For example jekyll-scholar for bibliography or jekyll-assets for assets management)
• host on github
  • one repository for the source, https://github.com/euctrl-pru/website
  • one repository for the generated site, https://github.com/euctrl-pru/euctrl-pru.github.io
  • other repositories for things like common development environment settings, js libraries, ...
• use Travis CI to build release commits and publish releases.

Rationale

1. Openess of our site even for our stakeholders
2. No need to go thru lengthy buying process
3. No expenses
4. Version control (yes!): we know what is out, who did push/change it (and why, probably).
5. github, Travis, Google Docs are reliable enough for our needs (and probably more than what we could ask internally)

Advantages

• Git is very flexible, see this tutorial.
• GitHub tools are easy to use
• GitHub does something similar

Drawbacks

• Social: there is on-going effort to use a public sharepoint
• Technical: will people be able to make the shift to version control?