Fantastic work, Shane. I hope the devs can soon be able to incorporate RFC0060 so we can all enjoy working with (and hopefully extending) this tool.
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Shouldn’t the title of this thread be for a tool to manage “safesites” instead of websites? Is there a better name for sites on SAFE?
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Maybe, but I’m trying to keep the amount of jargon to a minimum. Ultimately, I want it to be as easy for a newcomer to understand as possible. The more domain specific terms we force in there, the harder it all is to grok.
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Time for another update…
Pages and posts
I’ve finally bit the bullet and reworked the posts system to incorporate a concept of “Pages” (for anyone familiar with wordpress, it’s the same as how wordpress delineates “posts” and “pages”). This feature was a real pain, not only because it was basically redoing work I had already done in posts, but because by editing this core functionality I risked creating new bugs in a stable system. You can see here the “Pages” in action:
In the end, I decided to entirely rip out the posts code and begin from scratch with a concept of generic Documents, a post is a Document, and a page is a Document, but they have different rules governing how they work.
I ended up with a totally generic and re-usable system which only takes around 30 lines of boilerplate code to spin up a new document type. You can see here the code which runs the Pages page:
And the code which runs the Page edit page:
This is a really powerful system which I may consider exposing to theme authors in the future (so your theme could include a new Document type, for instance, an e-commerce plugin / theme which included a new Product document), so you can kind of see how the ridiculous amount of work it took to make all this functionality generic could pay off in the future as the greater ecosystem around Phantom expands.
Exposing theme config to the compiled websites
I’ve gone with the simplest method of exposing theme configuration to the frontend compiled websites: just spitting out a JSON object which theme authors can ingest.
Here you can see a partial output from a compiled website, with the vue / vue-router code, but if you look to the right of the script tag, you can see the theme configuration is exposed via a window.themeConfig object. There’s not much more to say about this except that the feature is now complete.
Image uploader
The only real task I have left is exposing the image uploader I created yesterday to the posts / pages so that users can upload and manage images directly within documents. I expect this will actually take me a couple of days, so I probably won’t have an update for you tomorrow.
Personal
I’ve been trying to make at least one commit per day since I started working on this project. I harbour a lot of internal guilt about how the SafeCMS project ended, and I’ve been using those negative feelings as fuel to keep this project burning. Sometimes it can be hard to find the motivation to get out of bed, sometimes I’ll procrastinate for hours before forcing myself to open my IDE. Strangely, I get a lot of joy from seeing a new box turn from grey to green everyday in Github:
I always appreciate the compliments I get in this thread, but I rarely hit like unless there’s something in the reply which I want to action later. I think that’s a systemic issue that a lot of developers have: we seem unable to experience praise. We know the truth: the projects we’re working on aren’t that difficult, it’s just throwing some code at the screen and seeing what works. For the most part, we are our own worse critics - that’s a real issue and one we’re going to need to collectively overcome. Anyway, I was just throwing some thoughts out there on a cold and wet Sunday.
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You’re doing great work Shane but there’s no need to do anything because of what happened to you.
I’m sure you are not alone with struggles like these, and not just with other developers although I suspect there are reasons why certain of us like this kind of work.
I at least recognise and share those kinds of emotions and behaviours. The good part is that you are able to see this in yourself, and I have seen that you know the healthy response is self-care and kindness.
You feel guilt, but that guilt is not justified given what happened, and that has been reflected in the response from the community since you explained. Feelings don’t bother with facts though, so they are real and have to be accepted. We all need to learn to respond to them in healthy ways, me as much as anyone. I urge you to feel free to do what you enjoy because you enjoy it rather than for other reasons. Take care and do recognise the thanks are genuine. What you do is not easy, not just throwing code. It takes a lot of work and skill to get the ability you have. The folks here recognise that because not many can do what you do, and certainly not with the speed and quality of the work you produce.
Take care man!
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You are not only a very talanted developer but a great person. Just take care of yourself. I wish I could give you a hug.
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@happybeing puts it more eloquently than I could.
There is no need to feel ANY guilt.
What happened, happened, it was no fault of yours AT ALL. I am very sorry for your loss and its a tiny consolation that returning to the concept/project you started has been of value - FIRSTLY to yourself, then if the community get something out of it - and we most certainly do - then that’s a bonus - a pretty massive bonus.
I’d love to just be able to “throw code at the screen” as you do. I bet I’m not the only one. You have a massive talent, thank you for sharing it so selflessly and constructively with us.
I hope you can get to Glasgow soon or there is a MeetUp in Manchester area so we can say these things to your face and buy you a beer at least.
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@shane throws code at the screen the way Picasso throws paint at a canvas. Really looking forward to seeing this masterpiece in action.
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Pre Phantom Dev Update 
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Firstly, thanks for the kind words over the last day. 
Image uploader
I’ve been doing some work on how image uploading works. Now, all document kinds (posts and pages, in this instance) have an Image Gallery button at the top right of the page:
Clicking on this button reveals a full-screen Image Gallery window:
I input some content, in this case a picture of my dog, Tifa, from my Phone, and I hit the Upload button:
Rather than have it edit the content of the document you’re editing directly, I decided to have each image simply spit out the markdown for the image (and the description you entered):
There’s a few reasons I went with this method, rather than writing code to directly edit the document:
- Editing input fields is hard. Really hard. It’s only of those “unsolved problems” of modern web development. Trying to figure out where the caret is, whether any content is currently selected, whether that content spans multiple lines, whether we need to reformat any Markdown after the edit, etc. It gets complicated really fast and I would spend a lot of time juggling bugs.
- This allows users to place the image anywhere they want, once, or multiple times.
- This allows users to edit the description if they want to while they’re placing it.
I took the lazy route out of this problem, and it’s the only part of the app where I’ve compromised on the user experience in any way, but it was for a good reason. 
… Perhaps I should have gone with a landscape image instead of a portrait for my testing. 
Bonus picture of Tifa
I realise I can’t leave you all hanging for a picture of my pooch and then not include a proper photo, so here you go:
Left to do
- I need to churn out a bunch of simple themes for the blogs at launch
- I need to add
media-querydirectives to the CSS to make Phantom responsive (I’ve been putting this off because I wanted to test against the network directly on my phone incase there are any edge cases I need to be aware of but I dropped it last week and it’s been away for replacement - I have it back now) - RFC0060 has now been merged! As soon as that’s implemented I’ll be able to test everything I’ve built against the shared network’s code, rather than the mock libraries. (Technically I’ll have to change one line of code first to be in line with the new changes in the RFCs, but who’s counting?)
A huge thank you to @dirvine for pushing this internally, @joshuef and Ian Coleman for working through the kinks with me and @bochaco for highlighting some internal issues which would cause issues.
After those three tasks are completed, I’ll going to be in hiding for a few days while I have a serious think about how I want to integrate dynamic network features (like comments systems, ecommerce, etc) in to Phantom. I’m likely going to build on the theme code I’ve wrote to have a more generic modules feature which allows modules to control new document types (for instance, a public document type named products and a private document type named sales which maps to a private network map of sales), but I need to really spend some time experimenting before I can commit to anything concrete.
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Superb work Shane. I took a little break from my current project (teach myself Vue by rewriting an existing e-commerce site) to have a play with the latest code.
It’s all looking positive and I can’t wait for RFC0060 to get merged.
Thanks again
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Just downloaded the new mobile browser v3.1. Sadly Phantom does not look too good in either landscape or portrait.
Not that I tink that trying to do this kind of work on a phone is a particularly good idea but others obviously do…
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Why use a phone for publishing websites when you can use a toaster!? Kids these days…
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Yep, I covered that in point 2:
Need to add media-query directives to the CSS to make Phantom responsive (I’ve been putting this off because I wanted to test against the network directly on my phone incase there are any edge cases I need to be aware of but I dropped it last week and it’s been away for replacement - I have it back now)
There’s a 50% chance I’ll get to this tonight, but it’s likely to be committed tomorrow.
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oops sorry -
Don’t rush on my account…
Like I say, I think editing sites on a phone is a very niche activity…
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No rush at all. Work which needs doing, needs doing.
The first commits have started to roll in adding responsive media queries to the app: The home page, about page and all Home components are now responsive · SAFEPublishing/Phantom@6b576c4 · GitHub Expect the rest through tomorrow.
Although it’s worth mentioning the app won’t actually work until the changes from RFC0060 are implemented and hit the browser, so there will be some extra waiting.
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Hey Shane. As an investor and not so much a tech guy like yourself. I just have to say I’m so thrilled you’re back working on this project. You’re going to help draw a lot more attention once baby and adult Fleming pop! Keep up the amazing work!
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Cheers! Ultimately, the goal is to create tools which people like you can use without having to understand the underlying nuts and bolts of the network. Once the necessary code changes in the RFC (request for comments) we had accepted today make their way through to the SAFE browser, you should give Phantom a fiddle. I’ll learn a lot more from a “not so much a tech guy” than I will from anyone else, so your input is invaluable.
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I like your project.