Docpad?
artelse opened this issue · 3 comments
Not really an issue, but a channel to ask what the Woods' objective is compared to for example Docpad which seems to strive for a similar goal?
Good question. Woods' main objective is to make a CMS that is accessible for backend novices. We get many website projects and I do not want to have to implement the CMS of every website myself and I do not want to have to pay someone each time to make one either. I would rather make it possible for web-designers with no backend experience to do it themselves. Each site that we can get running without a database, is one less worry on my mind. File systems come with nice things like versioning (if you backup your files or keep them on dropbox), built in search, find & replace etc etc. It makes sense for most small websites.
The first good solutions I came across were Kirby & Stacy - both great CMS's in their own right, but both PHP based. I have tried and failed to like PHP.
I like the idea of using javascript for everything, be it front-end, back-end or compositing video. I have searched for something like Kirby that is Node.js based, but without luck. None of the Node.js based solutions start building from the site directory as a DOM tree structure. I believe this needs to be the basis for any smart file based CMS.
Let me illustrate with a small example:
To make a menu of items within the current page, using Woods you can iterate through the children of the page:
for child in page.children
In the Beginner Guide of Docpad this is the code needed to iterate through pages to create a menu:
<% for page in @getCollection("html").findAll({isPage:true}).toJSON(): %>
In the future Woods will do static syncing to ftp and s3 and will also work as a live webserver (if you need something like comments, you have no choice but to serve stuff live).
Another important feature will be a web based content editor. Clients don't like to edit md files and never will. : )
Agreed on the menu iterator which seems at odds with their pref on using coffeescript syntax. I also come form the LAMP stack and it is such an overkill an many projects. Node.js is great, such an improvement, but haven't made my mind up about NoSQL or NoDB. CouchDB and MongoDB also are nice solutions for web apps with automatic syncing and such. http://hood.ie/ is a good example of that approach.
Do you have a roadmap laid out? I for example would love to see an integration with Aloha-editor. If you want to win clients over..
For some reason, we never have to make one of these 'web-apps'. Most of our web projects are portfolio sites & websites for small businesses / institutions.
I will work on a roadmap soon. Feature requests are welcome. Not sure about the wysiwyg editor though ; )