I’m looking for recommendations on a simpler way to author a small personal website than using Ruby on Rails (with which I would say I have ‘intermediate’ experience). The site will be mainly static pages built up from chunks (articles, menus, etc) that I would like to be able to author with something like Markdown so that non-techies can write articles. The site will also need some simple feedback-type forms. I probably don’t need extensive tests.
The site will be pretty minimal in look and I want complete control over the look and feel. I’m comfortable with Rails, Ruby, Javascript, HTML and CSS.
What I’m wondering is whether I’ll be making maintenance (including deployment) and authoring of content for the site more complicated than it needs to be by using Rails. I’ve heard a bit about Sinatra that piqued my interest but never used it – would that be less maintenance overhead?
Does the recommendation change if the site requires the user to login?
I’ve plumped for Sinatra (with Markup templates). This way I can easily build ‘static’ pages from partials and lob the odd form in too. Thanks for the replies – two people suggested Sinatra and I didn’t want to accept one over the other!