GlintCMS Documentation

The NO Management Content Management System

GlintCMS is an in-page, overlay style WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) CMS. What this means is that to edit a page you simply navigate to the page as you would when you browse your website. Once you arrive at a page you use the overlaid main menu to perform tasks or you simply hover over the main section of the page to edit content or change page settings.

The building blocks of GlintCMS are designed that you can build Web-Sites as well as Web-Applications.

Stability

Probably between experimental and stable. It is used e.g. on www.intesso.com. The best way to get started is, read along and install a starter project e.g. glintcms-starter-intesso.

You can use it out of the box for small to medium sites.

design goals and principles

• it is a GlintApp implementation
• runs in node.js and in the browser with browserify
• universal aka (isomorphic) javascript
• modular | collection of reusable, replacable modules | follows unix philosophy
• fast, no magic for SEO (like screen scraping of own content with headless browser)
• for WebSites as well as for WebApps
• Clean Code over Convention over Configuration
• mostly framework agnostic
• easy to learn
• flexible
• reusable
• inline editing
• minimal management backend
• minimal build tasks
• minimal configuration
• no dynamic require
• no magic
• only simple abstractions

technology

It is written purely in JavaScript and runs on node.js and in the browser thanks to browserify and makes use of many great modules from npm.

• It should work with all of the newer browsers.
• Express is used on the server side
• It runs on Linux and Mac OS, Windows is not yet supported (any help appreciated)
• Tested with node 0.12.7 aaaaand trörööööö 4.y.z

BYODB

Bring your own Database

GlintCMS uses glint-adapter for abstracting the data storage. glintcms-starter-intesso for example uses no database at all, but the file system fs instead.

You can write your own adapter provider for the database storage of your choice with minimal effort.

BYOTE

Bring your own Template Engine

GlintCMS works with any template engine that supports node.js and runs in the browser as well.

The existing modules use doT.js, ejs and jade.

Just keep in mind that not all of them perform as good. We made the best experience with doT.js.

use cases

Because GlintCMS is designed from the very beginning, to run efficient on the server as well as in the browser, it is a really good fit for many things.

• Web Application (Single Page Applications)
• Web Sites / Platforms (Heavy server side rendering)

building blocks

                                                                         
   +--------------+        +--------------+        +--------------+
   |              |        |              |        |              |
   |    wrap      | +----> |  container   | +----> |    block     |
   |              |        |              |        |              |
   +--------------+        +--------------+        +--------------+

          +                       +
          |                       |
          v                       v

   +--------------+        +--------------+        + + + + + + +  +
   |              |        |              |
   |    widget    | +----> |   adapter    | +----> +    cache     +
   |              |        |              |
   +--------------+        +--------------+        +  + + + + + + +
                                                                         

created with asciiflow

block

Blocks are the heart of everything that is editable in GlintCMS.

A block provider can be a plain text glint-block-text, or an image or a rich text e.g. glint-block-ckeditor etc.

The block itself (glint-block) is a unifying interface for the block providers.

It is the block providers responsibility to display its data and to turn it into something editable, when switching to edit mode.

They must basically implement the following sync functions:

load(content)
edit()
var content = save()

adapter

The adapter (glint-adapter) is the unifying interface for the adapter providers like e.g. glint-adapter-fs or glint-adapter-elasticsearch.

The adapter provider is responsible for storing and retrieving the data/content.

It only solves access to single types, entities, documents or tables (the terms very with the providers technology, let's stick with the term type').

It does not combine instances of different types (joins), that's up to the

An adapter provider must implement these async functions:

load(.., cb)
save(.., cb)
delete(.., cb)
find(.., cb)

cache

Is optional and is not yet implemented.

container

The container (glint-container) holds the different blocks and orchestrates nifty details, like

• what should be loaded (rendered) on the server and what in the browser.
• switching the blocks into the edit mode edit and back (save or load on cancel)
• passing the data between the adapter and the blocks.
• a container has got one adapter and most likely has several blocks.

If you don't have any editable content on your page, you don't need a container.

widget

A widget (glint-widget) can be useful for displaying content, that does not need to be editable in this place.

As an example, you could use it to display the three latest blog entries on the first page.

A widget implementation needs to implement the functions:

data(cb) // async, optional, if you don't need to load data in an async way
render(fn) // sync, returns the rendered content

The widget itself exposes the load function to integrate with the wrap loading mechanism.

wrap

The wrap (glint-wrap) wraps it all up.

• it can have several containers, widgets and wraps.
• it also is involved in what should be loaded (rendered) on the server and what in the browser.

next steps

• Try out the starter project glintcms-starter-intesso. (it should only take a couple of minutes to get going).
• Have a look at the API Documentation
• As well as the Extend Documentation
• Have a look at the code of the modules, shout out if you need help.

stay tuned

... for more detailed usage scenarios.

author

Andi Neck | @andineck | [email protected] | intesso

get involved

Any Feedback is highly appreciated. Please create an Issue or PR. I'm happy to add you as a comitter too.

license

MIT