Phantom: a publishing tool enabling users of the SAFE Network to easily manage websites

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Hi all, I know we only got an update a few days ago, but I didn’t want to leave anyone expecting something this Wednesday waiting.

I’ve made some good progress on the underlying structures used by the app in the last few days, although this hasn’t manifested as that many visual changes.

Screenshots

I’ve added support for images to the Markdown editor, and support for anchors. Of course, this also means support for anchors containing images. :slight_smile: I still need to add code blocks and blockquotes, these aren’t that difficult, I just haven’t got around to it yet.

I plan to add support for image uploads in the next few days (as opposed to just hardcoding images) so you should be able to create and manage images from within the post edit page.

I’ve removed the “Publish post” button from the post editing page, in favour of having a “publish drafts” option on the post listing page. It seemed a cleaner / easier way to manage published website NRS versions.

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Here you can see the post listing page. When you save a draft, it updates the FilesContainer. You are then presented with a “Publish drafts” button on this page which when pressed will update the websites version. At the moment, that doesn’t happen - because I need to add code to generate the blog home page (the post listing page). Expect this in the next update.

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As I said in the last version, post URLs are indexable by search engines and are stored as markdown wrapped in HTML, with a corresponding canonical link. This gives you the flexible (and cheap) deployments of a single page app, with the searchability of a pregenerated website (what is known in the business as server-side-rendering).

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I’ve been asked a few times about making the work responsive. The long and short of it is that I’m waiting on some API updates from the Maidsafe team before the project is in a deployable state where I’m comfortable testing it. As soon as I’m able to deploy and test it to an acceptable level, I’ll look at installing the Mobile browser and doing the responsiveness changes.

Background work

  • In the last week, I finalised RFC-0060: Enable creating and modifying of FilesContainers within the SAFE browser environment, adding an extra option (support for HTTP Content-Type mime-types and charsets when updating Raw buffers to FilesContainers) and put it forward for review.
  • I (re)discovered and reported a bug in the core API’s file synching code which was causing files not to be updated if the new size of a file was the same as the old size of the file.
  • I spent a lot of time messing around with the core API, looking for edge cases where I could eek out more usage, or areas where the API left something to be desired. Expect more topics / bug reports to come of this, I prefer to create a topic when I’m sure something is a bug (mostly to save face), so this takes me quite a while to fiddle.

In short, the next update should contain something akin to the following:

  • Enhanced Github flavoured Markdown support
  • Generation of blog post listing pages
  • The beginning of an inline image uploader
  • Thoughts and idealogies around the support of themes, including the support of a subset of the Wordpress event hooks for familiarity, namely Actions and Filters, where there is a translation directly from server-side-wordpress to client-side-SAFE.
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