Here’s the Deal

DocPad vs Octopress

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When comparing DocPad vs Octopress, the Slant community recommends Octopress for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Octopress is ranked 4th while DocPad is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Octopress is:

Octopress is designed to remove all the time-consuming and frustrating tasks you usually have to deal with when using Jekyll. You don't have to write your own HTML templates or do any configuration to get started. The default template also takes care of any basic CSS/JS you need to write to get going.

Specs

LanguageCoffeeScript

LanguageRuby

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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
Very easy to use

Pro
Lots of plugins (from Jekyll + 3rd party)

Another advantage of being based on Jekyll is default access to the extensive plugin system for Jekyll. There are also plugins developed specifically for Octopress.

Pro
Based on Jekyll

As Octopress is simply a framework on top of Jekyll, it benefits from being based on one of the most popular site generators available. The primary benefit is that it is backed by git and is built in such a way that the site can be easily re-generated if the content changes.

Pro
Uses Markdown for writing

Uses the Markdown syntax for writing blogs.

Ad
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.