[microtonal]

Octopress is based on Jekyll, however, it is not exactly clear to me what it adds to Jekyll. Is it the extra plugins? Is it Rake-driven management?

Reading through the documentation quickly, it seems to add a lot of complexity compared to plain Jekyll.

A comparison with Jekyll sans Octopress would be appreciated!

[imathis]

Jeykll is a static generator which has simple support for blogging. If you get started with Jeykll, you still have to write all your own HTML, CSS, etc. Getting a Jekyll blog from just a generator to the point where it's something you'd be proud to post takes a good chunk of time and many developers don't want to deal with designing their blog.

Octopress is HTML, Sass, Javascript and a set of Rake tasks and plugins for Jekyll. It's a framework for the Jekyll blog generator. It has a 320 and up, responsive layout. Some plugins that make blogging easier.

Octopress isn't really any more complex than if someone set up a Jekyll blog for you and handed you the keys, but of course it's going to look complex when compared to a generator.

[ojilles]

I'm using Jekyll, and it took me roughly 3 nights to get it all up and running. Now looking at Octopress, they've literally done a couple of things I did myself to Jekyll (new post rake task, uploading to production, etc. etc.) So if I'd start from scratch today, I would take a good look at Octopress indeed.

[masnick]

From whatI can tell from the git repository (https://github.com/imathis/octopress/), Octopress adds two major things to Jekyll: a bunch of automation (via the Rakefile) and a default theme.

Reading through the Rakefile, the automation actually looks pretty useful. For example, you can a new post with rake new_post["title here"] and Octopress will generate a properly named file for you with the correct yaml front matter.

I didn't look at what the default theme actually looks like, but looking through the code it appears to be useful in quickly getting a blog up. For example, it has a partial for integrating disqus comments out of the box.

[imathis]

The default theme is almost identical to the Octopress home page. The only differences are the color scheme and header logo.

[jparise]

This appears to be covered on the linked site itself:

Octopress is now based on mojombo/jekyll has been completely rewritten from the ground up with a mountain of goodies.

- A semantic HTML5 template

- A Mobile friendly responsive (320 and up) layout (rotate, or resize your browser and see)

- Built in 3rd party support for Twitter, Google Plus One, Disqus Comments, Pinboard, Delicious, and Google Analytics

- An easy deployment strategy using Github pages or Rsync

- Built in support for POW and Rack servers

- Easy theming with Compass and Sass

- A Beautiful Solarized syntax highlighting