Announcing Markdoc
blog.zacharyvoase.com
blog.zacharyvoase.com
It also uses markdown syntax and the code is VERY nicely written C. It's not a lot of code and pretty straightforward.
I'm glad to see some (more) competition; generating a static wiki out of markdown files kept in an arbitrary VCS seemed like such an obvious Right Thing that I was amazed nobody had quite done it before when I started in 2006. So it's good to see this and other projects like gitit explore the space some more.
The setup procedure you linked to uses a VCS because most people want to, but ikiwiki is VCS agnostic right down to running w/o one, and can be used in quite light-weight, simple ways. (Ie: Make a directory; put an index.mdwn in it; run `ikiwiki src public_html`to build and publish; done.)
I'm curious: Does markdoc really require its own built-in http server? Or was that included only to ease basic setup? And does it support editing pages via the web? Does its caching allow it to do incremental builds of only changed files, or is the whole wiki re-rendered each time it is built?
As I said, I haven’t really investigated Ikiwiki, but it does seem like a very comprehensive utility. Still, I was looking for something different, and I’m sure Ikiwiki is a better solution for certain use-cases. To answer your questions:
* No, Markdoc doesn’t require its own HTTP server, but being able to run 'markdoc serve' is helpful.
* No, pages can’t be edited via the web. That would require an authentication system, and would introduce some difficulties w/r/t version control (or require some VCS coupling).
* The way incremental builds work (at the moment) is that the whole wiki is re-rendered into a temporary directory, and then rsync'd into the HTML root. I’d like to write a 'markdoc refresh' command in future, but at the moment rendering is so fast there’s little need to.