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+---
+title: Philosophy
+---
+
+Jekyll offers a unique philosophy when approaching the problem of static
+site generation. This core philosophy drives development and product
+decisions. When a contributor, maintainer, or user asks herself what Jekyll
+is about, the following principles should come to mind:
+
+### 1. No Magic
+
+Jekyll is not magic. A user should be able to understand the underlying
+processes that make up the Jekyll build without much reading. It should
+do only what you ask it to and nothing more. When a user takes a certain
+action, the outcome should be easily understandable and focused.
+
+### 2. It "Just Works"
+
+The out-of-the-box experience should be that it "just works." Run `gem
+install jekyll` and it should build any Jekyll site that it's given.
+Features like auto-regeneration and settings like the markdown renderer
+should represent sane defaults that work perfectly for the vast majority of
+cases. The burden of initial configuration should not be placed on the user.
+
+### 3. Content is King
+
+Why is Jekyll so loved by content creators? It focuses on content first and
+foremost, making the process of publishing content on the Web easy. Users
+should find the management of their content enjoyable and simple.
+
+### 4. Stability
+
+If a user's site builds today, it should build tomorrow.
+Backwards-compatibility should be strongly preferred over breaking changes.
+Breaking changes should be made to support a strong practical goal, and
+breaking changes should never be made to drive forward "purity" of the
+codebase, or other changes purely to make the maintainers' lives easier.
+Breaking changes provide a significant amount of friction between upgrades
+and reduce the confidence of users in this software, and should thus be
+avoided unless absolutely necessary.
+Upon breaking changes, provide a clear path for users to upgrade.
+
+### 5. Small & Extensible
+
+The core of Jekyll should be simple and small, and extensibility should be
+a first-class feature to provide added functionality from community
+contributors. The core should be kept to features used by at least 90% of
+users–everything else should be provided as a plugin. New features should
+be shipped as plugins and focus should be put on creating extensible core
+API's to support rich plugins.