Introduction to FillPouch

FillPouch started because of frustration. A good place to start, actually. That is how good inventions come into this world.

We were frustrated generating HTML content. For websites and for SaaS front ends. We often start with a design and fill contents into it. Somewhere down the line we want to change something in the contents. We want to shift just a part of it and place it on another page. Or we want to introduce something new -- But we are not sure whether it is fully appropriate. We want to place just that part in another file, and include in the the main content. But regular HTML editors do not make all this easy.

We were frustrated with the look and feel of HTML. All the WYSIWYG HTML editors take you on a path of increasing complexity. But once the design becomes too complex, it is tough to go back to a more primitive state and reorganize the looks. Designing is an iterative process: We not only move from haziness to clarity. But sometimes we only reach a false dawn of clarity. So we want to go back to an earlier hazier state. But in the meantime, we do not want to spoil the content we wrote.

We had examined all kinds of HTML editors, visual and non-visual. Also code generators. Even AI tools.

Finally, we gave birth to FillPouch!

Who is this meant for?
As you would expect; this entire website was created using FillPouch (obviously!). This make one feel that it is meant only for programmers -- after all, it did arise out of the frustrations of a mainly back-end programmer when dealing with front-ends of SaaS applications. But frankly, it can be used by anyone who has the patience to sit through our documentation for about an hour or so. It is really easy. It is more than worth that time. Especially for the power that it provides!

It would be very useful to know the underlying "tree" structure concepts of HTML. If you are completely unaware of that, it may be a good idea to at least read this article first.

This is a command line program!
Don't get so excited that you double click on the program after extracting it. You have to go to the folder where the program was extracted and open the Windows command line there, and then run the program. You will have to provide the name of the project file (extension is usually .proj but it can be anything,frankly) It's a plain text file which need to have instructions as explained in this documentation.

Refer our own website project as an example!
When you unzip the downloaded zip file of FillPouch, it will contain all the files that were used to build this site (the one you are reading now) using FillPouch itself. Open all those files into an editor (VSCode is preferred) That way, when you read this documentation, you would have a truly live example for you to follow along. The main file of the project is named "fillpouch.proj" The rest of the files will be extracted under their respective folders.