I’ve been thinking about coding something for a while now. My site runs on Kirby a CMS I absolutely love and I think it’s still one of the best kept secret on the web. It’s the perfect mix between an SSG and a “regular” CMS.
But since it’s designed for developers, if you don’t know how to code, it can be hard to get started with it.
So I’m thinking about coding something I’m calling “Blogkit” which is essentially a starter kit to run a self hosted blog. The idea is to do all the “hard” part and create a complete site designed to run a blog but with the minimum amount of CSS possible so that people can use it as a starting point to customise it the way they want.
I’d love for the kit to have all the most common features available in a modular way so that people can easily turn on the parts they want to have.
I currently have a list of features I want to include but I’m curious to hear what people here think something like this should include. I don’t plan to sell this, I’m going to make it available for free.
Content portability. Being able to move your posts/pages to other platforms and import from other platforms without having to code.
Comments. Yes I know many bloggers don’t like comments but if you can just turn them on or off it’s a win-win for everybody. Of course having comments enabled requires spam protection and moderation. I use open source Antispam Bee for spam protection and it works very well.
Site search.
Easy way to modify/edit robots.txt.
Blogroll
Pages
I know these seem obvious, but last time I explored a bunch of blog platforms I was amazed at how many were missing one or more of these things. Especially, export import compatibility and how they were vague or evasive about this.
Best of luck if youu decide to move forward on this.
Kirby is file based and everything is stored in .txt files and uses markdown so moving it somewhere else is always going to be possible. Depending on where you need to import it it might require some custom work because each platform requires a different import format but it’s super easy to generate pretty much everything from Kirby
This one is hard because there’s no good solution for comments on a website at the moment. Implementing things like webmentions is not an option because it requires way too much technical knowledge and doesn’t make sense in the context of what I want to build.
Plan to have that
This is interesting. In order to upload kirby on a server you need to know how to connect to a server and if you know how to do that I think editing robots txt at that point becomes trivial
i think one thing that’s missing from this side of the web is software that isn’t deployed via command line in ssh. what makes wordpress so popular is how easy it is, including how easy its installation is. having an easy way to install that doesn’t require using a command line would bridge the gap for a lot of beginners, i think.
Kirby doesn’t require command line. You need old school FTP connection and you then literally just unzip a zip file and upload the content on the server. Everything else is done in a traditional admin interface
To expand, I want to build something not for the people who don’t know anything about the web but just want a blog because those people are better served by bearblog or micro blog.
I want to build something for those who know just enough to want to self host but don’t have dev skills to code an entire blog themselves.
yeah, i get it! there’s still a gap of folks who know enough to use FTP and not enough to launch a website via docker, them’s the folks i’m talking about. :)
So blot is cool but it’s not really self hosted. Publii I did look into it way back then and it seems like a very neat idea but unless they changed something you have to use the desktop app in order to publish something and so it makes mobile posting impossible.
Will this use Kirby directly or is it going to be custom built with inspiration from Kirby? It looks really cool but the license is pretty prohibitive. Every domain running Kirby has to purchase a license and you can’t modify the source code. Either way, it’s an interesting project idea!
The per site license imo is a good thing because is the only way to make projects sustainable long term. It’s also a one time payment and it’s not all that expansive compared to hosted solutions like Squarespace for example.
Also, if the plan is to modify the source code then it means you’re a person with dev skills and that also means a world of possibilities are open to you.