DocPad: It's Like Jekyll.

DocPad (like Jekyll) is a static website generator, unlike Jekyll it's written in CoffeeScript+Node.js instead of Ruby, and also allows the template engine complete access to the document model. This means you have unlimited power as a CMS and the simplicity of a notepad.

Huh?

Say you were to create the following website structure:
- myWebsite - src - documents - files - layouts

And you were to create the following files:

A layout at src/layouts/default.html, which contains

 <html>
 	<head><title><%=@Document.title%></title></head>
 	<body>
 		<%-@content%>
 	</body>
 </html>

And a layout at src/layouts/post.html, which contains:

 ---
 layout: default
 ---
 <h1><%=@Document.title%></h1>
 <div><%-@content%></div>

And a document at src/documents/posts/hello.md, which contains:

 ---
 layout: post
 title: Hello World!
 ---
 Hello **World!**

Then when you generate your website with docpad you will get a html file at out/posts/hello.html, which contains:

<html>
	<head><title>Hello World!</title></head>
	<body>
		<h1>Hello World!</h1>
		<div>Hello <strong>World!</strong></div>
	</body>
</html>

And any files that you have in src/files will be copied to the out directory. E.g. src/files/styles/style.css -> out/styles/style.css
Allowing you to easily generate a website which only changes (and automatically updates) when a document changes (which when you think about it; is the majority of websites)
Cool, now what was with the <%=...%> and <%-...%> parts which were substituted away?
- This is possible because we parse the documents and layouts through a template rendering engine. The template rendering engine we use is Eco which allows you to do some pretty nifty things. In fact we can display the all titles and links of our posts with the following html:
```
 <% for Document in @Documents: %>
 	<% if Document.url.indexOf('/posts') is 0: %>
 		<a href="<%= Document.url %>"><%= Document.title %></a><br/>
 	<% end %>
 <% end %>
```
Cool that makes sense... now how did Hello **World!** in our document get converted into Hello <strong>World!</strong>?
- That was possible as that file was a Markdown file (i.e. it had the .md extension). Markdown is a great markup language as with it you have an extremely simple and readable document which generates a rich semantic HTML document. DocPad also supports a series of other markup languages which are listed later on.

Installing

Install Node.js
Install CoffeeScript
```
 npm -g install coffee-script
```
Install DocPad
```
 npm -g install docpad
```

Using

To generate the rendered website, watch the files for changes, and run the docpad server
```
  docpad
```
To generate a basic website structure in the current working directory
```
  docpad skeleton
```
To regenerate the rendered website
```
  docpad generate
```
To regenerate the rendered website automatically whenever we make a change to a file
```
  docpad watch
```
To run the docpad server which allows you to access the generated website in a web browser
```
  docpad server
```

Created With

General

Node.js - Server Side Javascript
Express.js - The "Server" in Server Side Javascript
Query-Engine - The MongoDB Query-Engine without the Database
CoffeeScript - JavaScript Made Easy
Async - Asynchrounous Programming Made Easy

Markup Languges

Markdown - Markup Made Easy
Jade - HTML Made Easy

Template Engines

Eco - Templating Made Easy

Learning

To learn more about DocPad (including using and extending it) visit its wiki here

History

v0.9 July 6, 2011
- No longer uses MongoDB/Mongoose! We now use Query-Engine which doesn't need any database server :)
- Watching files now working even better
- Now supports clean urls :)
v0.8 May 23, 2011
- Now supports mutliple skeletons
- Structure changes
v0.7 May 20, 2011
- Now supports multiple docpad instances
v0.6 May 12, 2011
- Moved to CoffeeScript
- Removed highlight.js (should be a plugin or client-side feature)
v0.5 May 9, 2011
- Pretty big clean
v0.4 May 9, 2011
- The CLI is now working as documented
v0.3 May 7, 2011
- Got the generation and server going
v0.2 March 24, 2011
- Prototyping with disenchant
v0.1 March 16, 2011
- Initial commit with bergie

nitzan/docpad