Hey guys, it’s been a while since my last update - I’ve been working on a tonne of stuff to get this up and running. This week is just a bit of a teaser and an explanation about what I’ve been working on:
Above is the application (compiled as an app) in the state where it’s waiting for the user to authenticate through the Safe-Authenticater (the dots are animated, which is why it looks a little strange in a static image like this). It remains in this state until authentication is complete (or denied) and then renders the list of blog posts (or some information about why it failed and what the user should do)
As of right now, the following is all possible:
- Creation of domains (public names) and services within those domains (multi-domain, multi-service)
- The creation and uploading of a single post (no template, flat HTML) to a service
- The automatic updating of a blog home page which lists all the posts.
Still left to do are as follows:
- Creating the template to javascript compiler
- Creating a few simple default templates
- Letting posts be locally re-editable after they’ve already been uploaded
- Allowing the user to defer the publishing of the blog home page so that they can batch release posts should they wish
- Automatic (and optional) generation of
sitemap.xmlandrobots.txt
The past week or so has mostly been myself butting heads against Electron, the SafeAPI and Node, trying to get everything to work together seamlessly. I’ve had issues with compiling the Safe Browser (mostly my own fault, I made an assumption that V6 - the second Alpha release - was stable, but it was neither stable, nor current, wasting a lot of time) and getting those dependencies to interact properly with my application.
The good news though, is that I’ve tested the current version of the CMS on Windows, OSX and Linux (only Ubuntu has been tested, but most common distros should be supported) and it’s working correctly on all of them.
As of right now, I’m still on track to deliver this project for the end of February, and while the last week or so has been intensely soul destroying (probably 50 hours plus spent debugging issues only to find out that most of the issues were minor configuration or version conflicts) I’m happy to be over the slump and the end is in sight.
I’ll be uploading a little hello world blog post to the SafeNet in the next two weeks generated entirely by the CMS, so watch out for that. The next development update will likely be on Saturday or Sunday and I’ll post a little screencapture video of the app in action.
Lastly, I just wanted to publicly say a massive and humble thank you to @hunterlester with whom I’ve exchanged almost 50 private messages during the course of this project, I really wouldn’t be anywhere near as far along without him and his help so far has been invaluable. @dirvine copying in here so you see the comment about Hunter’s work. 