empress-blog

Note: if you have come here wanting to use empress-blog for your own blog then skip down to the quick-start. You do not need to clone this repo to get started, you only need to clone this repo if you want to develop empress-blog 🎉

This project is designed to be a fully-functional, static site implementation of a blog system that is mostly compatible with Ghost and is built on EmberJS with fully working out of the box SEO friendly output. It supports being hosted on AWS S3 or any other static site hosting solution.

This system supports the use of shallow forks of Ghost themes and currently supports

empress-blog Casper Template which is a shallow fork of the official Casper Template
empress-blog Attila Template which is a shallow fork of Attila

If you are interested in writing your own theme for empress-blog please check out create-empress-blog-template which allows you to run npm init empress-blog-template <name> right now to get started (without the need to install anything). Check out the readme for more information.

If you want an example of the this "in production" then check out the Chris Manson's Blog.

You do not need to be a web developer to be able to use this system. You just write markdown files and the rest of the work is performed by EmberJS' build system.

Super Quick Start

If you want to get your new empress-blog blog deployed on Netlify in less than a minute then you can just click this button:

If you want to instead work with your blog locally before deploying then you can continue reading

Quick Start

npx ember-cli@latest new super-blog

cd super-blog

# you can replace the template with the one you want to use
npx ember install empress-blog empress-blog-casper-template

It will ask you if you want to update the index.html file and you should say yes 👍

If you want to see the blog system running on your local machine just run npm start and you will be able to navigate to http://localhost:4200 to see the blog in action.

Note: you need [email protected] or later to run this quick start. You can update with npm install -g npm@latest or check the official docs

To build the static output directory, run the standard build process for a production Ember application:

npm run build -- -prod

This will generate a fully static output of your site in the dist folder.

Usage

Creating Content

This addon comes with helpful blueprints to generate posts and authors for you in the structure it expects. The first thing you should do is generate an author as follows:

npx ember g author your-name

Then you should be able to edit the file author/your-name.md to update the details.

Next you will want to generate some posts. If you only have one author generated (in a single user blog) you can generate a post as simply as running:

npx ember g post "this is a post I want to write"

Configuring

If you have already generated some content (see above) you will know that you are able to configure certain details about your posts. If you want to edit the global configuration you will need to provide a section in the Environment config file for your host Ember app (located in config/environment.js). You will see a let ENV = { declaration near the top of the file, you will need to add a blog key to that object with your configuration. Here is an example of that blog config object:

let ENV = {

  // leave all the other config intact and add the following key

  blog: {
    title: "The Write Blog",
    description: "Here is where I lay my words",
    logo: "/images/logo-white.png",
    rssLogo: '/images/logo.png',
    coverImage: "/images/cover-image.jpg",
    twitter: "emberjs",
    navigation: [
      { label: 'Ember Consulting', link: 'https://simplabs.com' },
      { label: 'Blog Home', route: 'index' },
    ]
  },
}

This example config shows you how to set a title and general description for your blog, have a logo and a cover image, a link to your twitter account and how to add some navigation to your blog.

Note: the images like /images/logo.png will need to be in your public folder in your host app.

Configuring your host & enabling RSS

The above configuration allows you to make your blog look a lot better but there is one piece of configuration that will enable some awesome features like automatically creating an RSS feed for you 🎉

Although, due to the nature of some RSS aggregators, you need to be very careful with this because it can mess up a cache that you have no control over. This is why it's dealt with differently than the above.

If you're not familiar with Ember configuration, you are able to specify some environment configs depending on what environment you are targeting. This allows you to have some configs only available in production (like Google Analytics for example).

If you go to the end of your config/environment.js file you will see something that is checking if the environment is production. You can add your host config to the blog config object as follows:

if (environment === 'production') {

  // ... any other production config you might have ...

  ENV.blog.host = 'https://chris.manson.ie';
}

When ember-casper-template sees that you have a host defined it will start generating the rss feed.

Custom Themes

If you are interested in writing your own theme for empress-blog you can get started using

npm init empress-blog-template <template-name>

This will create a brand new template addon in the folder empress-blog-template-name-template! This directory will contain a blank theme based on the official Ghost Starter Theme and is intended to be setup in such a way that anyone with HTML and CSS skills can start developing their own themes without needing much knowledge of Ember 🎉

If you are new to ember and you feel like there is anything we can do to help you get started please reach out to me on Twitter and I'd be happy to help you. You can check out the documentation for create-empress-blog-template here.

If you do end up writing an empress-blog template please let us know so I can include your template in a list of existing templates.

Importing content

If you would like to import your blog content from another platform into empress-blog we have a beta import function that we would love for people to try out and give feedback. It requires that you create an export file from your respective blog platform and then run the following command from the command line:

npx ember empress-blog:import --type=[import_type] [dump_file]

Currently available import_types are:

Note: When exporting a Tumblr blog you will be downloading a zip file which you need to unpack. Once you unpack your export zip file you will find a posts.zip file which also needs to be unpacked. Your dump_file will be the resulting posts.xml file.

Upgrade notes

If you are upgrading from [email protected] and you start to get some errors along the lines of:

cannot find helper xyz

you will probably need to update your template if you're using one of the "official" empress-blog templates.

If you have a custom template and you get this error you might need to install empress-blog-ghost-helpers as a dependency.

This is because empress-blog originally started as a "shallow fork" of Ghost, and therefore it supported all the helpers that Ghost provided for templates by default. Now you can optionally add support for these helpers which is particularly useful if you are porting a template from Ghost.

Contributing

See the Contributing guide for details.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

empress/empress-blog

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