To your suggestions, I would add one additional thing that has a relatively high priority: The comment system needs to get a spam filter (e.g. using antispam) and a better editing UI, as well as proper e-mail notifications for commenters. Such a comment system could then also be nicely reused for the new Phobos documentation instead of Disqus.
For comment system, I'd suggest that comments on phobos docs should not only be put at the bottom, but also inline with each module/function/class. We could put an icon at each function to popup its comments. It is more like taking notes(and discuss) with each paragraph.
For the antispam feature, I have no experience on that, so I'd have to learn about it :-)
For an editing UI, I suggest we combine markdown-editor and vim-bidings or emacs-bidings when JS is enabled, and use plain UI & button to preview when JS is disabled.
Also StackOverflow's PageDown would be considered
But by checking out the project I found that some of the things are lacking for a personal blog engine as compared to ghost:
- no style. I would be nice to have a default style.
Agreed, this is probably the most notable thing that is currently missing. A possibility to switch between different styles using the management page would also be nice.
See ghost's marketplace, what if we change the class names in the UI to be compatible with ghost's themes? That way people could potentially just use that market to use what themes they like.
- sparse documentation.
- no binary download.
We finally have a good CI server running, which I could use now to automatically upload binaries for various platforms (similar to DUB). This is something that I could start to tackle over the next weeks, possibly together with a little home page (e.g. at vibelog.vibed.org).
Looking forward to that.
- dependency on mongodb. I'd also like that posts could be saved into files (like jekyll & github blogs) or simple dbs like sqlite.
Sounds like a good idea. Together with this it would also be good to use the userman library, which is also used for the DUB registry and for the forum, to manage user credentials and make that DB engine independent as well. This would be something that I could look into as well.
OK :-)
another thing is Etienne Cimon suggested to use HibernateD, what is your comment on that?
- syntax highlighting and other tools are not incorporated
What I'm using now is JS based syntax highlighting with google-code-prettify. This requires a little text filter to be installed (
blogSettings.textFilters ~= html => html.replace("<code><pre>", "<code><pre class=\"prettyprint\">")), but Brian Schott's planned std.d.lexer looks like it would be perfect for server side highlighting and I'm also planning to incorporate that for DDOX and the new Phobos documentation, so that would be a low hanging fruit.
Yes, I was planning to use google-code-prettify also as I noted you were using it in vibe.d's blog.
I know the situation may due to you are focused on vibe.d/dub and other higher priorities, so I'd like to contribute to it.
I've add bootstrap and a theme similar to ghost the other day, you can view a demo on http://zhaopuming.cnLooks very nice and clean. If you want to contribute this or a similar variant, I would be happy to add it.
I'll complete it in my fork, and later create a pull request
What is your vision of this project? Do you want it to become a useful blog tool for not only your vibe.d site, but also a general purpose blog engine?
In fact, it's already used for a couple of small blogs and while there will always be a strong focus on the embeddable property, I'd definitely like to improve it as a stand alone system, too.
Glad to hear that :-)
Here is what come into my mind first:
- bootstrap based themes. It should have a default theme, and people could contribute their themes. By doing that I'd like to change the class names and html styles into a more bootstrap flavored one.
I'd be OK with that, I'll have to adjust a couple of styles, but it's always good to settle for a kind of standard.
- A better editor. I love markdown, so it would be nice to have a markdown editor with live preview. similar to stackedit
Good point. That should be very easy to implement and would especially help a lot for people who are not fluent with Markdown. This is also a good idea for writing forum posts, at least on large screens.
make the database layer independent on databases. First I'd like to add plain .md file support.
Move more logic into the front end. (Yes, ajax and all those crazy javascript stuff)
Sounds good, it should just still stay fully functional with JS disabled. But there are definitely a lot of places where the UI could greatly profit from some JS and AJAX.
What do you think? I'd like that it stays within the line of vibelog, so I don't want to do a fork that would go too far away.
Looks like all of your ideas are very much in line with mine, so except for the DB stuff, which I'd like to tackle in conjunction with the userman modifications, everything of the mentioned things should be good to go.
OK :-)
If you pre-approve what should be done first, I'll start doing it.
I think it has the same potential as ghost/nodejs. Or even wordpress.
Still a lot of work ahead, but it would definitely be nice to have something for D in that area. Especially when we can devote some time to do some serious performance tuning, it could have a good buzz factor.
I came to this plan regarding your response:
- The the css and themes
- build a live editor
- See if I can help with your work in userman and DB stuff.