Recently, I put together a landing page for an idea I had to try and test whether or not it was viable. I drove traffic to the page with Microsoft’s AdCenter, tracked clicks on some categories and tried to get people to sign up for a mailing list to be informed about when the service goes live. Nothing too mind blowing, but it was both fun and educational.
At the time, I had just started working with Node.js but wasn’t really proficient with it. I needed to put my landing pages together quickly, so rather than spend time beocming proficient, I decided to create the landing pages in PHP, a language I’d been using for the last 5+ years. Having used Express and falling in love with the Sinatra style, I decided to check out Slim. Having also used Jade with Express, I didn’t want to write HTML anymore.
So what to do? Simple, combine the two! After finding an existing Jade parser for PHP, I spent some time learning how views were rendered in Slim. Later that day, I had a working landing page running on Slim and using Jade to render views.
And how’d it work out? Pretty well. Slim is pretty quick, and as I already said, I really like the Sinatra style design. And of course, writing all my markup in Jade (and using Stylus for my css, albeit not automated) was pretty much everything I had hoped for.
Check out Slim-Jade; fork it, edit it, and most importantly, let me know what you think!