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Add to SafariWhen comparing DocPad vs Pelican, the Slant community recommends Pelican for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Pelican is ranked 1st while DocPad is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Pelican is:
All code is available on GitHub.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Built on Node
DocPad is published as an NPM module which makes it easy to integrate with an existing Node.js deployment.
Pro Has an active plug-in ecosystem
DocPad's has a large amount of plug-ins available to extend its functionality and compatibility with other language preprocessors and markup languages.
- Javascript preprocessors include: Coffescript, TypeScript, and LiveScript.
- CSS preprocessors include: LESS, SASS, Stylus, and Roole
- HTML markups include: Markdown, and Textile
- Templating engines include: Eco, Handlebars, Moustache, HAML, CoffeeKup, Jade, and Teacup
- JSON converters include: YAML and CSON
Pro Has Live Reload
DocPad has a Live Reload plug-in that leverages websockets to automatically update the blog content for users live on the site.
Pro Built on top of the Express framework
Although DocPad is a static site generator, if you find the need to, you can extend the site with the Express framework for dynamic content as well.
Pro Has graphical admin interfaces for managing your blog
There are multiple custom interfaces, including miniCMS available to DocPad which provide WYSIWYG editing and article management.
Pro Easy to deploy
Deployment plug-ins make deploying to hosting providers even easier, with plug-ins for GitHub Pages, AWS, and Google Storage.
Pro MIT-licensed
Pro Prebuilt Skeletons
Skeletons are boilerplate setups to provide a baseline structure for you to fill content into.
Pro Document and file querying with Query Engine
DocPad leverages Query Engine to provide a query API for querying files.
Pro Open source
All code is available on GitHub.
Pro Active community
Pro Uses a versatile, powerful and easy to use templating engine
Uses Jinja.
Pro Code syntax highlighting
Uses Pygments for code highlighting.
Pro Support for unique templates per page
Adds flexibility to create variety of websites.
Pro Content can be written in multiple formats
Supports reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats.
Pro Import your existing blog from many sources
Pro Customisable Themes and support for Plugins
Makes it flexible to cater to creation of variety of websites in addition to blogs.
Pro Multilingual
Easily handles multiple languages, like EN, FR, etc.
Pro Quite fast even for sites with thousands of posts
Can spin up an build sites with thousands of articles in a matter of seconds even on very old computers.
Cons
Con Support for Handlebars templates is not mature - integration is awkward
Handlebars' philosophy of "no logic in templates" makes some things difficult:
- DocPad built-in template helpers aren't available by default - they have to be manually added/exposed
- DocPad's example template code often includes logic, which makes it impossible to use within Handlebars templates -- it has to be abstracted into custom helper functions.
- Can't pass objects to function calls from within HB templates.
Con More up-front investment to learn/use well
DocPad provides a LOT of extensibility and dynamic capability, which means there's more up-front investment to learn DocPad well -- and deviating from the defaults while maintaining project robustness may be difficult.
Con Written in CoffeeScript (which could be a Pro depending on your preference)
Con Code samples in Documentation and any online Q&As are in CoffeeScript only (no JavaScript samples available)
Con The default template engine (Eco) only supports CoffeeScript, not JavaScript
Con The default template engine (Eco) does not support multi-line code tags
Con Theme inheritance doesn't seem to be a priority
There have been endless discussions for years but theme inheritance still doesn't seem to be a thing. You can "inherit" from the simple theme so you don't have to have all the required files in your theme, but that's as far as it goes.
Con Not as powerful as other more popular site generators
Con A little bit slower than some of its competitors
