DocPad lead the static-site-generator wave throughout 2011 until 2014, and I am proud of my investment's accomplishments during that time. However despite lingering users and a dark age of prolonged unpaid maintenance, these days it should be considered archived for the history books. It could not keep up with the competitive landscape in a way that provided return for investment, especially when considering the sunken ship of opportunity cost of the time that was invested into it.

DocPad's final releases were devoted to wrap up the project with a nice bow, and to admit its mistakes. Something which in hindsight, was also a mistake — an abrupt end would have been a better investment of time — unfortunately my conscience required closure to move on.

These are the summaries of DocPad's final hurrah:

​v6.79 was the last release to support legacy plugins

​v6.80 incorporated many years of ecosystem upgrades, increased performance, solved many long-standing issues, removed all non-vital server communication, and dropped support for legacy plugins

​v6.81 removed the dynamic abilities from DocPad which was an innovative feature of DocPad at the time but it grew to become better served by newer tooling such as Next and Nuxt

​v6.82 made many refinements and fixed many long-standing issues

​v6.83 removed the last cloud code, and updated the Bevry packages for massive peformance improvements

These days you are better served by either:

The un-staticsitegenerators concept, which is using a collection of independent unix-style commands composed into a completely customisable and interchangeable build system with only 20 lines of code.

Frameworks like Sapper, Stencil, Next, Nuxt.

Whatever tools that Headless Content Management Systems integrate with.

Personally, I find lit-html's ecosystem promising.

For those wanting to write their own static site generators, here are my learnings.

For those wanting to avoid the same time investment mistake, please read Zero to One — if that book existed earlier, it would have saved me a decade of my life.

With that said, the documentation continues for your lingering curiosity. DocPad should still work, but if it doesn't, you're on your own. Please submit fixes to the documentation if needed.

Regards, Benjamin Lupton, Creator of DocPad