VuePress VS MkDocs

VuePress is a minimalistic Vue-powered static site generator optimized for technical documentation and websites with a focus on content. It is suitable for creating documentation websites, blogs, and other content-focused projects.

VuePress - when I searched if it's supporting what I want (conditional rendering), the first result is a bug issue opened 4 years ago, so it doesn't seem to be a good option.

I'm new to IA Writer, and I'm wanting to use it to draft posts for my Vuepress site.

VitePress is listed in the documents as VuePress' little brother, and it is built on top of Vite. For those that don't know Vite is a build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects so it might sense to pair it with a static site generator such as VitePress. One of the original problems with VuePress was that it was a Webpack app and it took a lot of time to spin up a dev server for just a simple doc. VitePress solves these problems with nearly instant server start, an on-demand compilation that only compiles the page being served, and lightning-fast HMR. Let's get started!

VuePress

Trying to help build a design system at work in my spare time; no clue if it will go anywhere but it’s fun regardless. I asked the Elm Slack group what the equivalent of React Storybook. Specifically, I wanted a way to build a documentation website like Vuepress with the ability to host native Elm code to showcase components. They pointed me to Elm Book. While Elm Book has built-in theming capabilities, I needed CSS control over my components. While they support elm-css, I wanted the ability to use TailwindCSS. The Elm libraries haven’t kept up with Tailwind’s changes, which is fine; writing raw Tailwind CSS on Elm HTML functions is easy and co-located with the component you’re styling.

Vuepress is a minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system and a default theme that has been optimized for writing technical documentation.

Because of my frustrations, I've released two example GitHub repositories for two popular static site generators: MkDocs and Sphinx. The goal with these repositories is to be focussed on a minimal project using the static site generator, that builds into a Read The Docs theme compatible website, and provide supporting tooling regarding formatting of the underlying formatting language. It also provides the tooling needed to deploy to GitHub Pages both from the command line and via GitHub Actions (both are powered by the ghp-import project).

The documentation of the CLI is provided via a GitHub page as part of the repository. We are using MkDocs to generate the content, but I think most of the tools in that area are well integrated with GitHub and GitHub Actions.

The original mkdocs uses a Python package for its installer, so you can just pip install mkdocs, mkdocs new ., and then mkdocs build to convert markdown files into HTML.

If you don't like to run javascript outside of a browser, MkDocs is a great Python-based alternative: https://www.mkdocs.org/

I like Markdown because it's simple and doesn't give me that many headaches.

You know what I don't like? HTML, for user submitted content in particular. The mess I've seen, after someone opted for using HTML for messages in a system, because that's what JS based editors were available for at the time. Endless need to work against XSS, with more and more incremental updates needed to the sanitization logic, some of which broke the presentation of the data in the DB.

Never again. Markdown, BBCode, anything but that.

As for docs? Currently just some Markdown, because that's what GitHub, GitLab, Gitea and others all know how to render.

Maybe something like https://www.mkdocs.org/ for the more standalone use cases.

Developing the documentation website using an open-source static site generator like Sphinx or MkDocs to build the files locally through the command line, rather than using a commercial program.

MkDocs is BSD-2-Clause licensed and has a vibrant community; GitHub Discussion is used for questions and high-level discussion, while the Gitter/Matrix chat room is used to discuss less complex topics. These communities provide essential resources and support.