About JekyllLMS

Why I built JekyllLMS

I kept running into the same wall as both a learner and a creator: every "real" LMS wants a monthly fee, a hosted database, and your content locked inside its dashboard. For a side project, a documentation course, or a single paid playlist with a few free preview lessons, that's a lot of infrastructure for what's fundamentally just text, video links, and a curriculum order.

I already had Jekyll lying around for blogging. So I asked: what if a course was just a folder of Markdown files — one per lesson, sorted by an `order:` number — and the "backend" was a static site generator that already runs free on GitHub Pages? No signup flow to build, no auth to secure, no database to back up.

JekyllLMS is that idea, made reusable. It started as the theme for my own course notes, and grew into something that supports the patterns real creators actually need: a few lessons hosted free to build trust and SEO, the rest linked out to wherever the full paid course already lives (Udemy, Skillshare, your own checkout) — plus the monetization plumbing (AdSense) creators need to make a free site sustainable, without ever touching a server.

You own your content. Fork the repo, customize freely, and deploy to any static host — including GitHub Pages, which is completely free.