Shutting down DocPad?

Question

Shutting down DocPad?

balupton opened this issue 7 years ago · 21 comments

Hi everyone.

I'm considering shutting down DocPad. Taking the website and servers down.

DocPad hasn't been maintained since 2014. Since the focuses on my life went in very different directions. And since funding switched from full-time to casual.

There are plenty of bug reports coming in from incompatibilities with newer versions of things.

It seems less cruel to take everything down so people aren't wasting their time on an unmaintained and buggy solution.

DocPad now can be replaced by custom promise scripts fairly easily - I would say most sites would be able to switch to a custom solution within a week.

Let's aim for February for this move.

Answer 1 · 2018-01-10T05:49:55.000Z

Hi @balupton ,
We designed some websites using Docpad Framework. If you Shutdown the docpad, is it affect the sites using docpad?

Thanks in Advance...

Answer 2 · 2018-01-10T12:31:31.000Z

Things that will go down:

Skeleton selection when initialising a new project
Error reporting
Usage statistics
Subscriber signups
Version outdated checks
Plugin compat checks

The DocPad server stuff is at:
https://github.com/bevry/helper/blob/master/source/plugins/docpad.js

Existing projects will operate without any problem.

It would be nice to implement the DocPad v7 roadmap, and upgrade DocPad smoothly. However, it never got the return on investment that was needed to warrant it.

Answer 3 · 2018-01-10T12:41:08.000Z

That's Awesome. I am looking forward for Docpad v7...

Answer 4 · 2018-01-10T14:55:34.000Z

That's Awesome. I am looking forward for Docpad v7...

DocPad v7 isn't happening, hence the desire to shutdown the servers

Answer 5 · 2018-01-10T15:42:48.000Z

I will be sad to see it go, but I understand the impetus. Has there been talk of handing off to another community leader, or a democracy of active contributors ( @SteveMcArthur perhaps)? Hugo has just gained image manipulation capabilities, so I am sure I can find a replacement either way.

Answer 6 · 2018-01-11T15:10:44.000Z

If I could, could I do a fork of Docpad? There's a lot of work and fixing bugs, but I want to do an attempt. But, what's your opinion? May be worth it or Docpad is connected very tight with the dependencies of other Bevry projects?

Answer 7 · 2018-01-24T06:05:55.000Z

The servers cost $7/month, but currently are on free credits, so they can stay up.

The issue is more about putting an unmaintained - no active maintainers banner on the website to discourage new users.

Answer 8 · 2018-01-24T06:10:43.000Z

If I could, could I do a fork of Docpad? There's a lot of work and fixing bugs, but I want to do an attempt. But, what's your opinion? May be worth it or Docpad is connected very tight with the dependencies of other Bevry projects?

Well, a fork wouldn't even be necessary, happy to give you maintenance abilities on the existing repo.

The thing is, 2016 was spent updating every single bevry project, they all got new releases. I updated DocPad to incorporate these updates on the https://github.com/docpad/docpad/tree/dev-updatedeps branch, however I found out that ecosystem updates (mostly with npm) broke the plugin testing, so I started working on that - updated about 60% of the plugins, but still more to go.

So the next 6.x release is around the corner - but there is no maintainers right now to have it happen, as they have moved onto other projects - and there are alternatives to DocPad now that can also do the job, for instance even custom scripts are an option now.

The 7.x release will never happen, as it is about 6 months of work - it would establish DocPad as the best static site generator there is - but there are so many other more important issues than static site generation imho.

Answer 9 · 2018-01-24T15:37:38.000Z

The alternative is people just wait for me to occasionally be motived to devote a day here and there to upgrading it - releasing the devupdate minor version - never a new major. Perhaps this would even be at the end of the year.

Answer 10 · 2018-01-24T16:37:12.000Z

I say we just archive it for now and focus on new projects. The project will still be here.

Answer 11 · 2018-01-30T23:27:50.000Z

It is actually a bit motivating to do say one plugin each morning, just to get into the routine of a productive day. @Aglezabad if you do want to collab, or have me hand over the reigns, reach out to me on our slack channel, or hit me up on wire.com - username balupton

Answer 12 · 2018-02-01T07:37:47.000Z

Hi:
I don't have so much time (too many projects and I'm ending my degree), but I can get some hours to help you as much as I can.

Best regards.

Answer 13 · 2018-02-07T07:57:16.000Z

Okay. The path to upgrading DocPad's ecosystem is as follows:

# install https://github.com/bevry/based
npm install -g boundation

git clone git@github.com:docpad/extras.git docpad-extras
cd docpad-extras
npm install
npm run clone

then inside each plugin within docpad-extras/plugins run boundation to upgrade the project to the latest conventions (including CoffeeScript v2). If an error occurred while upgrading, make your changes then run boundation again. Once boundation has completed successfully, commit the changes, then add a version bump and changelog, commit that, and then run npm run our:release to release it to npm via ci.

associatedfiles has just gone through this process.

Once all plugins are upgraded, then we can release the new DocPad version from the dev-updatedeps branch.

bevry-base will ask you for NPM_AUTHTOKEN - if you are wanting to undertake this, contact me on wire.com (username balupton) and I'll give you a auth token.

Answer 14 · 2018-02-07T15:27:37.000Z

Alright. v1.11.0 of bevry-base released that makes the process more streamlined.

Updated plugins:

Answer 15 · 2018-02-07T15:40:45.000Z

Ok, I will contact you as soon as I can, so I could help you.

Answer 16 · 2018-02-16T07:29:45.000Z

I've started with my docpad plugin, so I can get some practise in this process, but npm shows me that bevry-base is deprecated.

npm WARN deprecated bevry-base@1.13.0: `bevry-base` on NPM has moved to `boundation`, use that package instead for updates

Should may I use boundation instead?

Regards.

Answer 17 · 2018-02-16T08:15:09.000Z

@Aglezabad, yes it's just a renaming: https://github.com/bevry/boundation

Answer 18 · 2018-03-07T02:00:20.000Z

Closing this issue, as will be maintained, just as a side project.

Answer 19 · 2018-03-07T06:27:31.000Z

https://github.com/docpad/docpad/tree/dev-updatedeps just got a significant push

all that is left for the next minor to be released are:

updating the rest of the plugins with boundation, to make them coffeescript v2 based, however this is not necessary if the environment variable EDITIONS_SYNTAX_BLACKLIST=esnext is set
merging in the master changes into dev-updatedeps
release

If someone wants to do all the plugin updates, then that would be swell, as I doubt I will ever get around to it - as I don't use DocPad enough to justify any significant updates.

Once step 1 is done, let me know, and I'll do 3.

Answer 20 · 2018-03-07T12:37:30.000Z

Okay, the next minor is released as a beta.

Pushed to the beta git branch, and released to 6.80.0-beta, under the beta npm tag.

Up to the ecosystem to upgrade the plugins.

Answer 21 · 2018-07-12T08:26:47.000Z

And v6.80.0 is out