The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Drupal
Channel: DrupalCamp NJ
Date: 2018-02-04

Chris Russo

Savas Labs is an agency that

    propels organizations with Drupal.

However, we chose to build our website with the static site generator Jekyll. There were good reasons we chose this path when we did. Alas, like most decisions there are benefits and drawbacks that play out over time. Since we've learned much over the years in the Jekyll space, we've built some pretty great tooling around our application. We've also built some that, well, frankly does what Drupal does out of the box. 

We'll take a deep dive into the pros and cons of our decision to build outside of our 🍞 bread and 🍯 butter: Drupal. We'll discuss what we've learned, and how we leverage lessons from both the Jekyll and Drupal ecosystems to better our work in both.

 Some of the highlights we'll discuss are: 

    A ReactJS comment front-end powered by a comment back-end we wrote
    Comparisons on
        Continuous integration
        Image optimization
        Hosting options
        Development environment / Editing UI
        Ruby & PHP 
    Opportunity costs

We'll cover a lot of ground showing the strengths of our Jekyll workflow, especially in the early days. We'll discuss how we ran into some limitations as our organization and needs scaled. Toward the end, you may just find out that we're returning to Drupal, but instead of spoiling any surprises 🤐, come hear about it in person! You'll certainly learn a thing or five and be able to apply lessons we've learned to make better decisions whether you're a PM, Developer, Decision Maker, or a dabbler working with Drupal, React or Jekyll. Also, I'll make some really forced Jekyll & Hyde references for the 19th-century literature buffs in the crowd - so you'll want to tune in for that.