Pennington

A content engine for .NET that turns Markdown into static sites, documentation portals, and blogs.

Features

• Markdown processing with front matter, syntax highlighting, tabbed content, and GitHub-style alerts
• Static site generation with automatic navigation and sitemaps (RSS feeds ship with the DocSite blog folder and the BlogSite template)
• Razor component library for navigation trees, code blocks, badges, and cards
• Utility-first CSS via MonorailCSS integration
• Documentation site template with built-in layouts, search, and content areas
• Blog site template for content-driven blogs

Mental model

Pennington is an ASP.NET content engine. In development it serves your site as a normal web app; in build mode it crawls that same app in process and writes the responses as static files.

There are three entry points:

Package	Use it when
Pennington.DocSite	You want a documentation site with sidebar navigation, search, styling, and static output wired for you.
Pennington.BlogSite	You want a content-driven blog as the whole site.
Pennington	You want the lower-level engine and will bring your own layout, routing, and styling.

Most documentation projects should start with Pennington.DocSite. Drop down to Pennington when the template shape no longer fits.

Installation

Pennington targets .NET 10 and .NET 11, and uses preview C# language features.

For the DocSite quick start:

dotnet add package Pennington.DocSite

Additional packages for specific features:

dotnet add package Pennington               # Core content engine
dotnet add package Pennington.UI            # Razor components
dotnet add package Pennington.MonorailCss   # Utility-first CSS
dotnet add package Pennington.BlogSite      # Blog site template

Quick Start

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Services.AddDocSite(() => new DocSiteOptions
{
    SiteTitle = "My Docs",
    Description = "Project documentation",
});

var app = builder.Build();
app.UseDocSite();
await app.RunDocSiteAsync(args);

Add Markdown files to a Content/ directory with YAML front matter:

---
title: Getting Started
order: 1
---

# Welcome

Your documentation content goes here.

Build a static site with:

dotnet run -- build

License

MIT