Hey, everyone. I'm the guy behind Postleaf. Thrilled to see all the love from Product Hunt today! 💙💚
Some of you might remember me from Surreal CMS (www.surrealcms.com), my SaaS that also features inline editing. Postleaf is my first installable product, and it just launched into beta a couple days ago.
I built Postleaf because I wanted to "thin down" the blogging experience into a minimal, beautiful, installable application. I had a few key objectives:
- Editing should be easy, and Surreal has proven to me that inline is the way to go. I haven't seen any other open source projects do it like this yet, and I really wanted to bring this technology (which has been around for a few years now) to the mainstream.
- Themes should be designed, not developed. Handlebars is a well-known templating system. It's extensible and it's a joy to use. Plus, there are variations for just about every possible platform out there. This makes themes portable and not attached to a particular application.
- Plugins should compliment the platform, not become an entire app that takes it over. (Note: plugins will launch after the beta, but you can get an idea of where I'm trying to go with this.)
- It should be fast! I'm using one of the fastest microframeworks (Slim) and the fastest handlebars rendering engine (LightnCandy) available to PHP. Because we all hate laggy pages!
Some of Postleaf's UI is inspired by Ghost <3
Ghost does a lot of things right and I think it's a great platform. However, I chose to use PHP/MySQL over Node or other stacks because it's available pretty much everywhere and so many people are familiar with it. This makes Postleaf much easier to install than a Node app, for example, which I think has been a real pain point for Ghost users.
One thing that makes Postleaf really unique is it's ability to produce complete backups. Your database tables are exported into JSON files and wrapped into a single .tar along with your content, themes, and uploads. It also stores relative URLs, so you can migrate an entire site by backing it up, copying a single file to your new server, and restoring it.
I've also taken some inspiration from Sublime Text and Atom, where you can press CTRL+P to search for posts, pages, users, tags, etc. It's so convenient, and I'm surprised none of the big players have done this yet.
And of course, for those who don't like inline editing (admittedly, it can be a bit distracting if you have a complex theme), there's zen mode, which will turn off all other styles and just show the title/content while you write. It can be toggled on and off with the click of a button.
I'll be in and out all day for questions. In the meantime, I'm working on a patch release that fixes some issues users have uncovered with the installer and some other minor things.
Oh, and here's the GitHub repo btw: https://github.com/postleaf/
Give it a star if you like it! <3
@jeffrey_wyman Some of the UI was indeed inspired by Ghost, they do a lot of things really well! But take a closer look and you'll find Postleaf is quite unique in many ways.
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@claviska I do like the inline editing, it's so good it should be a universal feature in all (most?) products.
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Really beautiful UX. There's a lot of companies out there who could learn a thing or two about it; definitely Windows 10 inspired with the sidebar and post column.
@hammyhavoc Surprisingly not, as I haven't used Windows in about seven years. I actually started with a sidebar with icons and text, then removed the text. Then made the icons bigger and just kinda stuck with it :)
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@claviska I stand corrected! Love it even more now! :- )
Congratulations! Looks great!
I have a few questions:
1. What about monetization options? Would be awesome to see something similar to AmpedSense for WordPress (dynamic ad injection) or a simple ad slots to put my tags in. (in-post, sidebar, header, mobile options)
2. Is it possible to place custom code inside the posts or pages? Thinking about Lead Capture widgets
3. Is lazy loading and CDN supported? We want our websites to run as fast as possible :)
4. Since most people will probably want to *switch* to Postleaf, what's the easiest way for someone to migrate a whole blog from, let's say WordPress or Blogger, to Postleaf?
5. Will Postleaf support AMP out of the box?
Looking forward to seeing all the cool plugins! Great work!
Thanks, Daniel:
1. These will vary largely depending on the user. I'd like to keep the core focused and encourage things like this to become plugins.
2. Yes! You can insert arbitrary embed code right in the editor. (Look for the button that looks like a cube.)
3. Again, I'd like to keep the core focused. There are many ways to do this so I'd prefer not to lock users into one particular method. It won't be hard to hook into this once plugins launch and replace the existing upload functionality with S3 or whatever CDN you prefer.
4. I debated holding off release until I had an importer, but decided it would be a good idea to let folks play with Postleaf to iron out some of the bugs first. It's on the list though: https://github.com/Postleaf/post...
5. Same answer as #1 and #3, as I don't think the majority of users will even know what AMP is. I'll be spending a lot of time on getting the right hooks in place to make sure Postleaf is fully extensible, so once it's out of beta and opened up for plugins, things like this will be trivial to accomplish :)
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@claviska Thanks Cory. It's hard to find a balance for this kind of platform though. You need enough users to convince plugins developers to join, and, at the same time, enough functionality for users to make the switch.
This is true. My hope is that the beta encourages users to try it out and get familiar with the project. Once the core is stable and plugins become available, a lot more people will be able to adopt it.
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