balupton/docpad — Issue #113: Survey: Where to go next???
Author: balupton
Created: 2011-12-19 09:35:57+00:00
State: open
Labels: news

Hey everyone,

Firstly, thank you all for your continued support, and constant feedback on docpad. It is truly amazing to see such a great community forming around a project that many of us have worked so hard on. It is really really great and warms my heart. So thank you all.

Next up, is it's time to prioritise where docpad can go. Anyone who's seen [The Roadmap](https://github.com/balupton/docpad/wiki/Roadmap) can tell that I have some very big ambitions for it. I truly see it is replacing wordpress for frontend web developers, and one day, replacing tumblr as well.

As such, here are some things on the roadmap that I'd really like your feedback on. Let me know how important this feature would be to you, when would you like to see it, and any other comments.

### Themes

Currently there is the concept of skeletons, however they are quite involved. For instance, say you have a dark themed skeleton, and a light themed skeleton, it will probably be pretty hard to move your blog posts from one skeleton to the other. Ideally, having something like the Tumblr theme selector would be pretty neat. Instantly be able to see what your website looks like using different themes. Not sure how this will work yet - perhaps add a new option to documents call theme, and add a new themes directory to src, which contains layouts and public directories.

### GUI: Management + Quickstart

Inside a empty directory, or your docpad website, when you run `docpad gui` it will start a new webserver. Accessing this web server will provide you with an interface for managing your plugins, themes, etc. It will also feature a quickstart type setup for setting up a new docpad project.

### GUI: Connect

Inside the GUI we could also have featured to connect with the rest of the community, e.g. build in this issue tracker, and have an interface to an irc chatroom, as well as be able to browse and see the profiles of other docpad users.

### GUI: Connect: Job Board

Inside the GUI connect section we could also have a job board.

### GUI: Exchange

Inside the GUI, having an area where you can publish new plugins and themes easily would be very nice. As well as install and discover new plugins and themes.

### GUI: Exchange: Training Centre

Inside the GUI, a place where people can post screencasts and tutorials on how to work with new languages, websites, and anything web development. The ideal learning environment.

### GUI: Exchange: Store

Inside the GUI, a place where you can buy premium trainings, plugins, themes, etc. Please let me know what type of content you can imagine here, or what type of content you would purchase.

### A Proper DocPad Website

Would a proper docpad.com type website be worthwhile implementing? Personally I love the http://www.getflow.com/ website.

### Automatic Deployment

Time can also go into setting up a docpad.com type website, where inside the gui or whatever you can hit a `deploy` button and your docpad website is instantly published to username.docpad.com for you. So instead of you hosting it yourself, we host it for you. What features would be required here? I'm thinking initially just copy the out directory and we host it statically - so no support for dynamic websites initially.

Cool thanks guys. Do let me know all your feedback. I'm reading [The Lean Startup](http://theleanstartup.com/) and do believe docpad is something special, and could even become a business one day the size of wordpress/tumblr. Also, do you have any crazy ideas that you want here? I'd love to know them.