DocPad. Intuitive web development.

Initially web development was pretty easy, you just wrote a bunch of files and you got your website. These days, it's a lot more complicated than that. Things like databases, synchronisation, legacy frameworks and languages all slow the entire process down into a painful crawl. It doesn't have to be like that.

DocPad takes that good ol' simple approach of writing files and wraps it with the best modern innovations, providing an awesome intuitive, liberating and empowering solution for HTML5 web design & development.

At its core DocPad is a language agnostic document management system. This means you write your website as documents, in whatever language you wish, and DocPad will handle the compiling, templates and layouts for you. For static documents it will generate static files, for dynamic documents it'll re-render them on each request. You can utilise DocPad by itself, or use it as a module your own custom system. It's pretty cool, and well worth checking out. We love it.

When would using DocPad be ideal?

for learning and implementing new languages and web technologies into real-world applications
- DocPad's ability to run a potential infinite amount of languages is amazing, and as you are always working with a real website you're never forced to re-implement anything into another system.
for rapid prototyping of new interfaces which need to facilate changes quickly
- The ability to get up and running as quickly as possible with DocPad really helps here, along with its support for pre-precessors you can quickly move about your codebase and rejig things when things need to change - without having to rewrite any architecture.
for frontend prototypes which will be handed over to the backend developers for implementation
- Often to gain layouts, templating, and pre-precessor support we'll have to implement a web framework, a templating engine, and code a custom build script for each of our pre-precessors that we use. This takes a lot of uncessary time, and complicates things during handover to the backend developers who then need to learn the tools that you've used. Using DocPad we abstract all that difficulty and handle it beautifully, allowing you to just focus on the files you want to write, and we'll provide you with the layout engine, templating engine, and pre-precessor support you need. When it comes to handover, the backend developers will have your source files, as well as the compiled files allowing them to use whichever is easiest for them.
for simple websites like blogs, launch pages, etc
- DocPad's static site generation abilities are great for this, and with DocPad's built-in support for dynamic documents we can also cater for the odd search page, enquiry form or twitter stream
for thick client-side web applications
- Combining DocPad's pre-precessor support and static site generation is amazing for developing thick client applications, as you can utilise the latest pre-precessors at any time, allowing you to focus on the problem, instead of how to implement the problem

Benefits over other Static Site Generators

Truly language agnostic, able to code your documents in any markup or pre-precessor that you like, you can even mix and match them!
- see what markups are already supported
Great for any type of website, not just for blogging
- discover existing websites already built with DocPad
Get started from scratch with a fully functional website in a few minutes
- you can use an already built website as the basis of your new one
Highly extensible and easy to use plugin system
- pretty much if DocPad doesn't already do something, it's trivial to get a plugin to do it
Easy to extend the server with custom routes, or use DocPad as module in an even bigger system
- documentation coming soon
Deploy easily to plenty of free Node.js hosting providers, or even just deploy it to plenty of free static file servers like GitHub Pages and more
- view our hosting guide
Built in support for dynamic documents (e.g. search pages, signup forms, etc.), so you can code pages that change on each request
- documentation coming soon

Installing

Install Node.js

Install DocPad

[sudo] npm install -g docpad@6.0
[sudo] docpad install

If you also want growl notifications (OSX), then install the growl command line tool here

Getting errors? Try troubleshooting

Quick Start

Once you've installed, you can get started with a brand new spunky functional website in a matter of minutes, by just running:

mkdir my-new-website
cd my-new-website
docpad run

This will create your website, watch for changes, and launch the DocPad server. It will ask you if you would like to base your website from an already existing one to get started even quicker.

Once done, simply go to http://localhost:9778/ to view your new website :) or when your website uses a different port, go to the url that docpad run mentions

What next?

Here are some quick links to help you get started:

History

You can discover the version history inside the History.md file

License

Thanks

Sincerely, thank you. Lots of love from the DocPad Team

oloed/docpad