alicoding/specter

Specter Is

An open source platform that simplifies the process of blogging by providing:

• A pleasant writing environment

• A system that can be configured and deployed in minutes

• Customization that is limited only by your imagination.

Does all this sound too good to be true? Don't believe what I say? See it in action for yourself

Getting specter up and running

1. Clone the repository

2. Download elastic search for your platform

3. cd to the location where you cloned specter. Do an npm install to install all the dependencies and then npm start to run it. Specter should now be running on http://localhost:3000

Doing stuff with specter.

All right so you have installed specter and it is running. What next ? Here is a typical workflow with specter.

• If you are running specter for the first time you will have no posts in the database and it will automatically take you to /create . Here you can create a post that you want to publish. The writing envrionment in specter is based on abstract. All of your drafts will be saved locally.

• To publish your draft you need to provide specter with a secret. These are defined in \specter\constants\contributors.js file. Edit the file if you want or use the default secret to publish an article.

• To edit an article you need to url-of-the-article\edit and you will be taken to the edit screen where you can make changes to you post and then publish it in the same way like you did before.

• To delete an article you need to url-of-the-article\delete and provide it with your secret.

#Creating contributors in specter

Specter has no concept of sessions. The operations in specter are controlled through urls which have to edited manually. To provide security specter maintains a contributors, \specter\constants\contributors.js , file that defines all the users who are authorized to perform actions on specter. To add another contributor all you need to do is edit the contributors file and add a

   {
       name:"",
       secret:""
 }

to one of the sections : admins, users or guests.

An administrator has the highest authority he can edit or delete any post. A user and a guest have equal privileges and they can edit or delete only their own posts.

Theming specter

Theming specter is incredibly easy. In the \views directory there are templates that use pure html and a bit of mustache by default theyu are all built on twitter bootstrap so just by switching the css to one of the swatches you can get a lot of diversity. Other wise if you prefer to write you own css you can create a styles file in \specter\public\styles directory and link it to any template that you want.

Specter imposes no restrictions on the structuring your markup either. Only thing it cares about is the mustache variables. As long as you are using the right variables in the templates feel free to change the html structure to any form that you want.

Coming soon

Detailed tutorials on how to configure, modify and personalize specter.

Licence

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2013 Akshat Jiwan Sharma

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.