Show HN: Cockpit – Self-hosted API-driven CMS. Manage content once | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cockpit – Self-hosted API-driven CMS. Manage content once

getcockpit.com

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I like the design but the font rendering on chrome makes it very difficult to read

Your text has issues on Windows 8, Chrome Version 35.0.1916.153 m

http://i.imgur.com/g9Ey8Fu.png

Site looks great though

thank you, I'll investigate the font issue.

The docs are not readable on windows chrome, many people make this mistake it's uncanny, last week Google did this when they launched their new webdev tools.

You can try and load the svg version of the font first for chrome, you can do this via a chrome only media query, for example: https://gist.github.com/wycks/42e88a4a6e034863584c

If that doesn't work you can try a .htaccess rule. If that doesn't work you need to re-render your fonts.

Make sure to test in all browsers when you make a change because it might suddenly work in chrome then break in ie.

Just a note, it's not a Chrome issue only, it looks the same on Opera/presto (Windows as well).

Ah beaten to it.

I am working on something similar targeted at .NET platform. Definitely hate how bulky CMS's have become. I wouldn't call these CMSes either. I'd rather call them Content Management Platforms.

Keep going. Don't make it language dependent, keep it simple and lean with the ability to integrate with a static HTML site via JS or a Ruby site with a Gem or whatever else people want.

Juggling a full time job and rent makes things difficult :( I try.

Would love to see that.

I started then gave up on a .NET CMS installed via a nuget package. Definitely an area where the .NET tools/libraries are lacking.

Have you got this up on GitHub? Sounds like something I'd enjoy contributing to

Sorry its all proof of concepts at this point. Just means I got to work harder.

Hate to buzzkill what looks like an awesome project, but redhat took this project name already:

http://cockpit-project.org

This is what I want out of a CMS, I want it to be something I can add into an app, not something that wants me to write my app around it.

This was our thought too as we were building a knowledge base widget that works with existing websites by embedding and blending inline to the page's design. Others required you to set up another support site and match the design and we thought we could do it differently and save people time. You can learn more at http://userdeck.com/guides.

This is kinda the direction i am going to, while creating sites for clients and a cms for them (iterating on it, every website). Your layout is much nicer though :P

PS. I also like the CMS's that use Blocks for creating a website, eg. what https://buildwithcraft.com/ is doing.

yepp, it's on my todo list :)

Then checkout Sir TrevorJS ;)

http://madebymany.github.io/sir-trevor-js/

So, you're saying, Cockpit will have editable content blocks so the client can easily structure a page with different kinds of blocks? I might love you if that's it :)

Do you know of any open source CMS that is doing this? It's all that I want and it seems no CMS has this out of the box (apart from Craft, of course)

It looks pretty.

I just wish someone would build a decent CMS on top of silex/symfony/laravel, rather than implement their own framework to drive their CMS, such as in this case (Lime?!).

I want all the extensibility of a fully tested framework but with some batteries included. Pagekit looks as though this could cover my needs.

Cockpit is about simplicity. I like it to be lightweight and with a minimum of overhead ... but I also understand you arguments. It's all a matter of taste :)

What overhead is there using silex instead??

Even if there were an overhead, I'd rather have the stability of a fully tested framework than relying on an implementation with no tests.

What you have essentially done is created a framework, which in order for me to extend your CMS, I am going to have to learn. I also would lose the added benefit of not being able to use existing packages for (insert widely used fw here).

I can't really understand why you aren't using composer as well, it seems as though you are managing your own dependencies in the vendor/ folder?

Look, I have respect for you going out and creating your own cms. But I seem to get constantly disappointed when I dig into the nuts and bolts, and unfortunately this one is no different.

Hey guys, I created a fully functional demo of Cockpit in a terminal.com container. (I use nginx and php-fpm) You may want to take a look on it at https://terminal.com/tiny/vaW1CCG13n

It's demanding a email for username instead of admin:admin?

Or am I supposed to sign up...

First you get your terminal.com account (they give you $10 of free credit) and them just start a new instance of that terminal. Once you get it running you will will see the admin panel in the embedded browser or just point yours to http://<yourterminalname>-80.terminal.com/cockpit/

I get 502 bad gateway after starting the snapshot. Am I missing something?

edit - Do this after starting the snapshot:

chown www-data:www-data /var/run/php5-*

Was just a permissions issue.

Thanks for the heads up. I fixed it here: https://terminal.com/tiny/picFl5Lgl5

FYI, I can't read the docs on mobile (iOS chrome). I click the menu and I see the list of topics, but clicking any one of them doesn't render its page. Maybe problem with my internet connection? Dunno but you might want to look into it.

In your example dashboard screenshot, put some content in there rather than have them all empty. Make up a fake business or use an example from your own work elsewhere?

you're right, this is a great improvement

This is excellent. It's a good frontend for gathering content to deploy on static sites. Getting non-techies to write Markdown is still somewhat of a pain.

Thought the same, but it doesn't seem like it exposes a REST API for getting at the content during a build of a static site. Seems like it's just meant as the content management part of a dynamic PHP site.

Would be interesting to see an open-source alternative to content API's like Prismic or Contentful.

you should be able to access content via API - http://getcockpit.com/docs#!api/cockpit-js

Does this allow you to host multiple sites with separate theming from 1 install?

Looks great, but would love a working example to look at.

just download and try it out...setup takes less then 20sec. If you don't like it, just delete the folder and forget it ;-)

Sure, but you spent so much effort and time making the beautiful landing page and documentation, you might as well have a demo. I can't be the only person too "lazy" to download, and run it.

thanks, I'll consider it!

FWIW I second this, it looks beautiful, but setting up a site on my VPS takes work; even if it's 20 seconds to download and install, I have to set up configs, DNS, directories, etc. Would love to see a demo.

I always assumed that every developer has a local dev environment, it seems I was wrong :)

By that you mean php dev environment? That would be more of a safe bet 10 years ago.

Yes. A demo would be really nice!

How about creating a docker container? http://docker.io This would actually add the benefit of easy evaluation, while also helping us to jumpstart a project with cockpit.

Setting up a vagrant file would really make this an easy thing to install (perhaps a little longer than 20sec).

It won't work with vagrant, it strips out the port number when doing redirects (uses them a lot it appears) so you always end up with failed redirects.

You should wrap it up in a docker container. All you need to do is create a Dockerfile in your repo and wire it up to http://hub.docker.com . That way the "try it out" steps are "docker run faulancer/cockpit-demo"

good idea, thanks!

I made a working demo in a terminal container! https://terminal.com/tiny/vaW1CCG13n

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