What is the crowd's opinion of
DocPad?
From 3.5 billion comments
3 reviews of this app found across the web:
Agree, a slow down is in order. A general rule of thumb is that if there's not already a tutorial out there that tells you how to get that exact job done, you're not gonna wrap your noodle around it immediately.
That said, the tutorial for docpad will get you, I think, probably 90% of what you are looking for. The "getting started" tutorial also shows you a basic templating engine they recommend and how to get live reload working.
Sounds like a robust static site generator may help you out, have you looked at Docpad? All the quick turnaround of a static site generator, but with the ability to tie into a datastore for more dynamic applications.
As with all of the SSGs out there, there is no "editor", you'd use whatever text editor to write flat files. Frankly, once I got acclimated to that way of thinking, I have a hard time justifying the time expense and bloat of code of CMSes.
Backbone is a library, about 2/3s of a full framework. If you want to learn it, I'd actually start with Marionette.js which fills in the missing third of functionality. Doesn't exactly help you out, making things more complicated out the gate, but those are the breaks.
I chose Backbone.js over the rest of the frameworks the old fashioned way: because a company said "we're willing to pay you to work on our Backbone site". Done.
I fully believe Angular has eclipsed Backbone in popularity at this point, so why would you want to learn it? Well because it is a library and is just as applicable to server-side Node.js as frontend webapps. I recently switched my blog to use docpad and wouldn't you know it? The internals are Backbone. It's very cool to me that the frontend and backend both use the same logic.
Throw you a bone, here's a free O'Reilly book on Backbone