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Sitefile planet

A section looking at alternatives or comparable projects from the Node.JS sphere.

harp

enables filesystem-based content for websites too, but does so in a project-generator type of fashion.

Sitefile is unobtrusive, except for some configuration file. Also sitefile does not focus on providing an development platform, harp is far more extended. some concepts such as asset management (styles, images) are interesting.

Meteor

Like harp, Meteor is an development platform. Meteor especially promotes its generator/deploy mechanism. More than I've seen with harp though, Meteor provides for an re-integration of the client and backend sides, presumably using web sockets. (Meteor renders client side, presumably using some web-sockets based RPC. It needs add. components to render server-side for non-JS clients)

There is no discussion on the deployment systems, and I presume this makes the only valid target servers meteor enabled servers. It would be great is the server for the integrated backend/frontend environment was portable or cross-compilable. See also HaXe.

Docutils reStructuredText

It does not appear that rSt is that popular with the Node.JS crowd. Even with Sphynx and the like it looks like it has not gained much traction beyond Python.

One popular? node module is actually to convert rst to markdown.

Node.JS
It's so simple to aggregate rich apps with Node.JS and NPM that Sitefile unless it grows is not so much needed. Even without Express and standard libraries only: https://gist.github.com/ryanflorence/701407 And just for static files: http://www.sitepoint.com/serving-static-files-with-node-js/
node-static
Makes easy streaming of files. Would be nice to integrate with for media centers with Sitefile HTML UI?
wiki-server
"A Federated Wiki Server"
GIT based wikis

  • Gollum

  • Realms, a "Git based wiki written in Python Inspired by Gollum, Ghost, and Dillinger"

  • Jingo "Node.js based Wiki".

    Something to look at. Given its GIT based store and Wiki formatting this may provide for another interesting file-based content router.

Editors
Dillinger
"Dillinger is a cloud-enabled, mobile-ready, offline-storage, AngularJS powered HTML5 Markdown editor."
Ghost
"A simple, powerful publishing platform https://ghost.org"

reStructured Text documenation tooling

Sphynx

Python documentation generator based on Du (ie. rSt to HTML, LaTex, etc.)

Provides some additional reStructuredText directives, uses its own publisher chain.

Nabu

Document publishing using text files.

Provides an extractor framework for regular Du transforms to turn into data extractors. Extractors are paired with storage instances, of which Nabu provides some SQL compatible baseclasses. Indexed external metadata can then by used by other systems, such as a blog publisher.

Potentially, Du transforms can rewrite documents and ie. enrich references and various sorts of embedded metadata. For a complete setup, this would require a reStructuredText (re)writer however.

pandoc

A pretty heroic "swiss-army knive" doc-conv effort in Haskell.

It is not completely compatible with Python Docutils rSt, but does an pretty amazing job on converting rSt and a few dozen other formats with each other. Worth a mention, without it being used by sitefile (yet).

Other Non-NodeJS-related Topics

Markdown

Markdown is less well defined and in general far less capable than reStructuredText, but very suited for simple marked up text to HTML conversions.

Its simplicity is only one likely cause that it is far more popular across various web-related projects. Commercial suites from Atlassian elaborate on a similar plain text editor formats.

TiddlyWiki

"a non-linear personal web notebook"

Not opened in years and never really used it, but the concept is really nice. May already provide some Node.JS integration.

Jekyll

"Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby"

via:GitHub Pages - Using Jekyll with Pages
HaXe

Has nothing to do with publishing, but looking at deployment options it has some interesting feats to mention in addition to Harp, Meteor and Jekyll.

HaXe is an ECMA-script language with compilers for a number of other high-level languages, including PHP and JS. It also provides for RPC setups for use on clients, and an ORM system. Its API is nearly cross-platform. Making it very interesting to use it for writing not only clients, but also servers that support a certain publishing stack.