Prontotype is a lightweight, server-side framework to help you quickly build interactive, data-driven HTML prototypes.
It's great for building responsive design prototypes (especially for larger sites) that typically need a lot of iteration and finessing.
See http://prontotype.allmarkedup.com for setup instructions and documentation. Prontotype makes heavy use of Twig and YAML so becoming familiar with them will help you greatly in mastering everything Prontotype has to offer.
- Quickly build linked, multi-page prototypes with realistic URLs
- Define reusable chunks of HTML to make prototype-wide updates quick and easy
- Separate your layouts from your content using powerful template inheritance
- Mock-up everything from simple login behaviours to complex role-based authentication scenarios
- Use YAML, JSON, CSV or XML files to define data structures that will be accessible throughout your prototype
- Write CSS using Less or Sass (SCSS) and have it automatically compiled for use in your protoype
- Give your pages IDs so you can move them around easily without breaking links
- Use whatever frontend prototyping framework you like
- Auto-generate navigation, forms and more using in-built macros
- And plenty more!
- Linux-based web server
- A web server like Apache (optionally with mod_rewrite or equivalent enabled) or Nginx
- PHP version 5.3.2+
- Composer
Prontotype is still very young! The following is a list of things (in no particular order) that are on the to-do list for the near-future:
- An example site to better show off all the features of Prontotype.
- Export to static HTML for easier sharing
- Extension system to allow you to model more complex behaviours that need server-side logic.
- The ability to specify contextual notes and have their display state toggled easily on and off.
- WURFL (or similar) integration to allow for prototyping of server-side device detection.
- Coffeescript compiliation to work in a similar way to the LESS compilation does.
- Unit tests to make sure everything is working ok!