For background, Federalist is tooling wrapped around Jekyll, AWS and Github so that it feels like a CMS but you are actually editing a static site. In building many Jekyll sites for our partner agencies (and for ourself as the 18F site is a Jekyll site) we found that the process of using and maintaining a Jekyll site was very technical and required a great deal of context. So we built Federalist to reduce the friction of using static sites.
It automates the following:
* Setting up webhooks on the Github repository to be notified of any changes
* Building the site when it receives notifications of a change and then pushing the site to an S3 bucket
On top of that it provides an editing interface for non-technical folks to keep content up to date.
As always, its about tradeoffs and if the WordPress API route is working well for you, I think that's a good one and I've personally heard a lot of great things about the new API and consuming it with a smaller JS app/front end. Personally, I prefer to work with static sites so that I don't have to concern myself with database availability or stability as a single point of failure for the site.
If you're looking for more information, I invite you to join our public slack at https://chat.18f.gov and entering the "federalist-public" room. Hopefully see you there!
I'd try it out. My hesitation would be that things come up in the morning, but an interesting thesis and I frequently find that the weekend is overloaded.
Coming from a mobile ad network myself, we read the paper and there are a few points we'd like to make. Mainly that the study only tested the first 33 seconds of the app launching, which is the shortest session time I can think of, especially for a chess game...