About 4 months ago I started the update process to move from Statamic 3 to 4. I ran into all sorts of issues and spent a good month trying to get the whole upgrade process figured out. This has been my long-standing issue with Statamic; it’s very developer-friendly and I’m just not an active developer anymore. I have only good things to say for what the team at Statamic is doing, it’s an amazing CMS. But it had started to become a chore for me.

I’d also gotten myself into an issue with how complex I had made the CMS. As a natural tinkerer, I had been exploring all manner of complex post structures in order to make “interesting” blog posts. As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. I had toys and I wanted to play with them, regardless of how much worse it made things. What had been pretty simple markdown posts were now a mess and not at all human readable. This started grating on me.

And so I stopped writing. Dumb.

I decided it was time to simplify things again so that I could just write. But where to start? I needed to have some boundaries.

  1. Markdown for blog posts. No crazy WYSIWYG B.S.
  2. Flat file output. No database, no server admin. Screw that.
  3. Understandable templating structure.
  4. Something with a solid history but isn’t bleeding edge.

And so I began testing out some new things. I ran though Hugo, 11ty, Gatsby, Ghost, Kirby, Jekyll and a few others. I added in Ghost and Kirby because a few folks I follow use them and I figured it was worth looking into. In the end, Jekyll ticked all the boxes above and just felt so easy to use. The templating structure is dead simple to grasp, and even though Liquid isn’t the best tool in the world, I know it already.

Another aspect of my Statamic site that had been grating on me was Tailwind. I had redone the site and had been hearing about how amazing Tailwind was. It seemed an opportune time to learn it while redoing my site design. Looking back now, I should have known I’d hate Tailwind. I’m used to Sass and keeping my HTML templates pretty clean. It was time to strip that all out. Jekyll has built-in support for Sass, so I could go back to using something I was comfortable with.

Migrating all my posts over wasn’t simple and it took a few weeks. Instead of looking at this as a chore, I used the time to rethink how I wanted my content structured. I can now open up any of my posts in virtually any text editor and read them with ease.

I’m still making design changes to the site, which I enjoy immensely.

There are still a few rough edges though that I want to think through but overall, I’m pretty happy with the move to Jekyll. As you can see by looking at the site here, it’s not complex and I don’t write all that often. I didn’t need a super-charged CMS anymore (did I ever?). I needed a blogging tool, and so far Jekyll fits the bill nicely.