Purpose

This is a test of evaluating Hexo - a static site generating tool, mainly for blogging - to be used as the framework for new church web site.

A few reasons to try Hexo:

• Easy to use.
• Easy to customize.
• Clear separation between content and look & feel.
• Static site is easy to host. Advance features can be in serverless approach.
• Hexo has fairly big tech community - easy to find help.
• All the tools in the tool chain are free and open source.

How it works

• Based on Hexo framework.
• Theme of snippet with some customization
• Main content in Markdown

How we can use it (without too much overhead).

• Separate team as ‘content writer’ and ‘tech supporter’.
  • ‘Content writer’ provides content(post) in markdown format.
  • ‘Tech supporter’ creates and maintains website structure. We’ll need graphic experts here as well.
• Content (output from ‘content writer’) could be hosted on either github or gitlab as a content repository.
• The generated website could be hosted as github/gitlab page.
• We’ll utilize some online CI(e.g. Travis) tool to automate the process of generation and deployment.
• Eventually the website will be auto updated whenever ‘content writer’ commits new content to github/gitlab. Only minimal ‘tech support’ need to be involved for updating.