VoodooPad 5 is out, and it’s awesome. Here’s some of what makes me excited about it:

• All-new file format allows synching via Dropbox or version control (like git)
• Markdown pages (with syntax coloring, and smart Markdown authoring features like automatically extending lists)
• New event scripts make automating document tasks a lot more consistent

Also, VoodooPad just generally rocks. Go buy it; it’s on sale for a limited time.

There’s a ton of other new stuff, but I’ll leave it to you to read about it if you so desire.

Instead of gushing on about the new version, I wanted to share a project of mine that provides a starting point for using the new VoodooPad 5 hotness to create a static website. I call it, creatively enough, my VPWebsiteTemplate:

https://github.com/onecrayon/VPWebsiteTemplate

VoodooPad 5 already offers a lot of great features for exporting a website version of your document. What the VPWebsiteTemplate does is provide some scripts that offer additional functionality:

• Automatic renames pages when you create them to be URL-friendly
• Automatically generates page breadcrumbs using tags
• Copies image and Javascript assets into folders (instead of having everything cluttering up your root website directory)
• Adds support for Markdown-Extra style header IDs for easier same-page navigation
• Automatically strips out nested links if VoodooPad and Markdown interfere with one another

And a number of features that stem from its origins as a static app documentation site generator:

• Converts -> and => into → entities
• Converts shortcuts using the format `command H` to use <kbd> elements (for easier styling as shortcuts)
• Fixes paragraphs wrapping <aside> elements (since Markdown doesn’t handle HTML5 elements well)

VoodooPad isn’t appropriate for everything, but if you need to manage a static site with a single shared template (or a single template with minor variations), it’s hard to beat. The Markdown handling, dead-easy synching, and fact that you can package up absolutely everything about your site into a single file that is shareable with other VoodooPad users make it a really compelling solution for anyone who has had to fight with command-line static site generators before.

Documentation for using the VPWebsiteTemplate is available inside of the file itself, so go download it from GitHub already if you’re wondering how everything works. Happy Voodoopadding!