Prontotype
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.
Prontotype lets you:
- 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!
What you'll need to run Prontotype:
- Linux-based web server
- A web server like Apache (optionally with mod_rewrite or equivalent enabled) or Nginx
- PHP version 5.3.2+
- Composer
In the works...
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!