DocPad vs Roots

DocPad is published as an NPM module which makes it easy to integrate with an existing Node.js deployment.

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

DocPad has a Live Reload plug-in that leverages websockets to automatically update the blog content for users live on the site.

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.

There are multiple custom interfaces, including miniCMS available to DocPad which provide WYSIWYG editing and article management.

Deployment plug-ins make deploying to hosting providers even easier, with plug-ins for GitHub Pages, AWS, and Google Storage.

Skeletons are boilerplate setups to provide a baseline structure for you to fill content into.

DocPad leverages Query Engine to provide a query API for querying files.

Roots has heavy corporate sponsorship and is worked on very actively as a full time job. That means you can rely on it.

You can deploy to heroku, github pages, s3, etc. with a single command.

Roots supports dynamic content like jekyll for every compiler and language.

Roots is currently in the process examining how to leverage newer technologies to make Roots even better. You can see the new project on github: https://github.com/carrot/roots-mini

Here is the blog post explaining the next phase of Roots: https://medium.com/@jescalan/eaa10c75eb22#.uacjziaej

Here is the stack they're experimenting with:

- jade - for markup
- babel - for JS and JS transforms
- postcss - for CSS transforms
- webpack - as the core compiler

As this is a work in process, it just means the future of Roots continues to look great.

Not only does roots support a huge number of languages and compilers out of the box, it also allows you to insert custom compilers if you want. Fun fact, roots is the only static site generator that supports dogescript

Roots compiles files once for each extension, which allows for some advanced options if you get to that stage

Roots will precompile your templates into js, which makes it really smooth to work with client-side MV* frameworks.

Since roots is written in node, everything is compiled in parallel rather than in series, making it very quick.