Roots
Roots is a toolkit built on best practices for advanced front-end web development. It has a very large number of features, which I’ll attempt to list below. Roots comes in the form of a static site build tool by default, but also includes templates and plugins for express and rails.
- extremely simple installation
- clean and minimal default project template
- clean and intuitive app settings file
- jade, stylus, and coffeescript default stack
- easy to add languages with a simple and well-documented plugin interface
- super fast live reload implementation
- compile errors displayed as a flash message, doesn’t break workflow
- layouts and partials fully supported
- coffeescript and markdown can be written directly in views
- global variables and functions (view helpers)
- extremely robust, modular, and powerful css helper library built in
- single command deploy to heroku, nodejitsu, or github pages
- intelligently minifies html, css, and js on deploy
- efficient client-side js management through bower and require.js
- automatically precompiles jade templates for use in client-side MVCs like backbone
- use dynamic content to create collections, blogs, etc
- compile a single file for multiple languages