Our Philosophy
Every successful open source project has a certain “vibe”, those thought patterns and behaviors which ensure meaningful, constant progress forward and the growth of a vibrant developer community. We feel it’s important to lead with a set of basic principles that will help guide the project long into the future.
(This page is lengthy, so feel free to skip over to the next section of documentation!)
Table of Contents #
Core Principles #
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Move fast but try really hard not to break things. Most developer-focused software projects err on a side…either the side of extreme backwards-compatibility with past versions, or the side of evolving quickly and requiring devs to go through multiple rounds of “yak shaving” when upgrading to new versions.
We hope to strike a thoughtful balance between those two extremes. We don’t want to break stuff or change the setup process just for the heck of it. But we also don’t want to be constrained by past problematic decisions which reduce the quality of the software. History has proven many times over that open source projects which fail to keep pace with the times and new trends in software eventually wither and die. This is a fate we wish to avoid!
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Embrace the backpack analogy. We recognize Bridgetown can’t be all things to all people. Bloatware isn’t good for anybody. However, we do believe that it’s important to provide a curated “backpack” of tools ready to go that can help you build most websites most of the time. We want Bridgetown to come with everything you need to get started building great websites.
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Convention over configuration. We strongly believe Bridgetown should encourage powerful defaults and best-practice conventions to give website developments an instant leg up as they start new projects. If you have to go fishing for a bunch of extra plugins and add a slew of extra libraries and reconfigure settings just to complete basic setup tasks, we’re doing it wrong.
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Be a leader in Jamstack-style technology (without being constrained by it). Bridgetown’s progenitor (Jekyll) played a significant role in kicking off the modern explosion of the “Jamstack” due to its static generation bona fides. In fact, there might not be a Jamstack today if Jekyll’s popularity as the technology powering GitHub Pages hadn’t caught fire in the early 2010s. Our sincere wish is that Bridgetown would play a unique and vital role in the continued expansion of this exciting way of building and deploying websites, while also identifying and correcting ways we feel the Jamstack space has strayed too far from its inaugural mission. (For instance, we’re skeptical of building complex fullstack applications using serverless functions. It’s a solution in search of a problem not everyone has, and it’s often promoted by the very hosting companies who benefit from increased usage of serverless functions because they offer no alternative. Buyer beware!)
A Brief History of Bridgetown #
Bridgetown started life as a fork of the granddaddy of static site generators, Jekyll. Jekyll came to prominence in the early 2010s due to its slick integration with GitHub, powering thousands of websites for developer tools. In the years since it has grown to provide a popular foundation for a wide variety of sites across the web.
But as the concepts of modern static site generation and the “Jamstack” came to the forefront, a whole new generation of tools rose up, like Hugo, Eleventy, Next.js, and many more. In the face of all this new competition, Jekyll chose to focus on maintaining extensive backwards-compatibility and a paired-down feature set—noble goals for an open source project generally speaking, but ones that were at odds with meaningful portions of the web developer community.
So in March 2020, Portland-based web studio Whitefusion started on Bridgetown, a fork of Jekyll with a brand new set of project goals and a future roadmap. Whitefusion’s multi-year experience producing and deploying numerous Jekyll-based websites furnishes a seasoned take on the unique needs of web agencies and their clients. Since that time, we’ve seen this strategy pay off in a big way.
Bridgetown has grown considerably since its inception, but in many ways, we’re just getting started. We hope you join our community, build something awesome with Bridgetown, and share it with the world!