Q2 2024: Bridgetown 2.0 is coming! See below…

Howdy, I'm Jared! I'm currently loving life in the Pacific Northwest 🌲 and building the next version of Bridgetown, a "vanilla-first" progressive site generator & fullstack framework, powered by Ruby, Roda, & esbuild.

Why You’d Want to Sponsor Me

The short answer is Bridgetown is the only Ruby website framework which is successfully competing head-to-head with Gatsby, Eleventy, Astro, and other popular JavaScript-based website frameworks. Look, I appreciate many of those frameworks! (Not Gatsby. 😂) But we need a healthy "polyglot" web that appeals to all sorts of developers and use cases. Bridgetown punches above its weight in this regard. Let's keep the momentum going!

The long answer is:

I care about expanding the influence of the "alt Ruby" community (aka the world of frameworks outside of a certain train-themed behemoth 😉) AND promoting the values of vanilla-first, HTML-first web development. I've written a course called CSS Nouveau and run a lively Discord server all about getting back to frontend basics. I'm in the process of finishing an initial beta of a new web components library (already in production use internally) which offers Ruby-based server rendering as well as client-side reactivity for advanced UIs. And with the upcoming release of Bridgetown 2.0, I'll be building out an ecosystem to power subscription-based indie publications so that my own platform Intuitive+ can be replicated by other Bridgetown developers who wish to offer educational products.

Why Bridgetown Might Be Your Ideal Jam-Stack

Bridgetown starts off as a static-site generator. It's very simple. You write some Markdown and some HTML, add some CSS along with a sprinkle or two of JavaScript (maybe! maybe not!), run a command, and poof! You have a website. Push it up to GitHub, wire it up to Render or another Jamstack hosting platform of your choosing, and you're golden. (You can even use a SSG-friendly CMS like CloudCannon to visually manage all your content…perfect for editors!)

But the fun doesn't stop there! We've also fully integrated Bridgetown with the venerable Roda web toolkit to allow for "hybrid" deployments. Create additional dynamic routes, connect to databases, provide live APIs, and do…well, pretty much anything. This pushes Bridgetown way past mere Jamstack territory and into fullstack web development. I firmly believe for small to midsize publications and public-facing applications, Bridgetown is THE "alt-Ruby" framework you should be looking at.

👉 We Need Your Help 👈

As detailed on the Bridgetown blog, the v2.0 release cycle kicks off a bunch of improvements to modernize the codebase and its dependencies. Ruby 3.1+. Node 20+ & NPM (no more Yarn requirement!). ERB by default instead of Liquid. And then a new set of features, such as a new web component-based rendering pipeline (as hinted above), fast refresh for rapid local development, and ecosystem enhancements like form rendering, auth, and Mastodon API-based commenting.

We also have a lot of catch-up to do in the documentation to make sure developers know how to take full advantage of all these enhancements.

🙏🏻 Your direct assistance, both with your sponsorships and your code/docs contributions, is greatly appreciated! Every penny goes towards enabling steady and comprehensive improvement and promotion of the Bridgetown framework and ensuring its success for years to come.

Thanks for your willingness to sponsor me. Let's build a better web together.