[jeremiak]

Hey there, cool that you found Federalist! There's a blog post we wrote when releasing it that might be helpful: https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/15/federalist-platform-launch/ - You can find the homepage at https://federalist.18f.gov, but the majority of the application is behind authentication so that might be only so useful.

For background, Federalist is tooling wrapped around Jekyll, AWS and Github so that it feels like a CMS but you are actually editing a static site. In building many Jekyll sites for our partner agencies (and for ourself as the 18F site is a Jekyll site) we found that the process of using and maintaining a Jekyll site was very technical and required a great deal of context. So we built Federalist to reduce the friction of using static sites.

It automates the following: * Setting up webhooks on the Github repository to be notified of any changes * Building the site when it receives notifications of a change and then pushing the site to an S3 bucket

On top of that it provides an editing interface for non-technical folks to keep content up to date.

As always, its about tradeoffs and if the WordPress API route is working well for you, I think that's a good one and I've personally heard a lot of great things about the new API and consuming it with a smaller JS app/front end. Personally, I prefer to work with static sites so that I don't have to concern myself with database availability or stability as a single point of failure for the site.

If you're looking for more information, I invite you to join our public slack at https://chat.18f.gov and entering the "federalist-public" room. Hopefully see you there!