Introduction

    Each page generated by VuePress has its own pre-rendered static HTML, providing great loading performance and is SEO-friendly. Once the page is loaded, however, Vue takes over the static content and turns it into a full Single-Page Application (SPA). Additional pages are fetched on demand as the user navigates around the site.

    A VuePress site is in fact a SPA powered by Vue, and webpack. If you’ve used Vue before, you will notice the familiar development experience when you are writing or developing custom themes (you can even use Vue DevTools to debug your custom theme!).

    Each markdown file is compiled into HTML with and then processed as the template of a Vue component. This allows you to directly use Vue inside your markdown files and is great when you need to embed dynamic content.

    VuePress is still a work in progress. There are a few things that it currently does not support but are planned:

    • Plugin support

    Nuxt is capable of doing what VuePress does, but it is designed for building applications. VuePress is focused on content-centric static sites and provides features tailored for technical documentation out of the box.

    Both are great projects and also Vue-powered. Except they are both completely runtime-driven and therefore not SEO-friendly. If you don’t care about SEO and don’t want to mess with installing dependencies, these are still great choices.

    We’ve been using GitBook for most of our sub project docs. The primary problem with GitBook is that its development reload performance is intolerable with a large amount of files. The default theme also has a pretty limiting navigation structure, and the theming system is, again, not Vue based. The team behind GitBook is also more focused on turning it into a commercial product rather than an open-source tool.