Jekyll

[ghost]

From reading the documentation this seems shockingly similar to Jekyll, ported to PHP. I would be inclined to switch over if you could provide, or link to some comparisons of features / performance difference.

[ludovicchabant]

Hi,

It is indeed inspired by Jekyll, among other static website generators (there's a lot of them), so you'll find similarities. There's also a lot of differences if you look closer.

I did some performance tests a few months ago and PieCrust was a bit faster, but I didn't want to publish the results because the code was still changing quite a bit. When I reach version 1.0 I may run them again and publish them.

I haven't written any feature comparisons either -- I'll need to work on documentation and marketing also when I reach 1.0. The biggest difference in my mind, and the one that prompted me to write my own engine, is that it's also designed as a lightweight dynamic CMS, which means that when you preview the website, each page is generated on the fly, as opposed to baking the website incrementally in the background. In a lot of cases this is better and faster IMHO. Other interesting features include multi-blogs, a debug window, more interesting data exposed to the templating engine, and multi-step file processing (e.g. process a Less file into CSS, and then minify it). The downside is that Jekyll is a lot more used, has more plugins, and has themes with stuff like Octopress (PieCrust does support themes, but it's very new).

If you have specific questions, feel free to contact me directly on email or twitter.

[jqno]

I've considered Octopress (which is built on Jekyll) as well. For me, PieCrust has 2 big advantages that won me over:

1. It's PHP, not Ruby. I've programmed Ruby professionally for a year, and while I love the language, setting up an environment with RVM is just a pain. And because everything's RVM these days, setting up an environment without it has become a pain as well. Whereas PHP just works out of the box.
2. In Octopress, you're expected to git clone the entire repository, and commit your blog along with the code, which just feels broken to me. If a new version of Octopress comes out, you'll have to merge all the files yourself, which is a pain. With PieCrust, you can just download the program somewhere, and keep your blog in a separate repository. Which is how it should be.

I did find a github repo for an Octopress theme for PieCrust, BTW :). It's at https://github.com/hardfire/piecrust-octopress-theme/

[ludovicchabant]

Ah yes, one of PieCrust's goals was also to be usable with minimal to zero setup. I'm actually working towards offering it as a .phar file, so you just have to download it and it's easy to move around and put somewhere in your PATH.

I recently learned about that Octopress port, yes, but I actually had one locally as a test when I was implementing theme support for PieCrust (mine is written as a proper theme, whereas hardfire's one is more of a website template). I was waiting to hear from Octopress' author before I released it publicly, just to be polite, but I didn't get any answer. Since Octopress is under the MIT license, I think it's perfectly OK to copy it, so it will be available in the near future after I've done some clean up.

[jqno]

It's easier to ask for fogiveness, than to get permission :).

I'd love to see the Octopress theme! I've been using hardfire's template, but it has some issues. I'd love to see it "done right" :). And to use it too, either for my website, or as an example for building my own theme. (If I ever find the time for that...maybe I should deploy at some point, too :) )

[ghost]

@ludovicchabant I am singing the praises of your work here, however the user has a concern

I don't need CMS. Just php library to convert git flavored markdown to html and vice versa.

Can PieCrust be used in this way, without the CMS?

[ludovicchabant]

Thanks @svnpenn :) However it looks like that guy is looking for something more like Pandoc, in that he need a bi-directional converter between Markdown and HTML.