Revamping SAFEpress.io

[ja...@analytixbar.com]

Hey there!

Thanks for the reply on my thread and hope you are having a merry xmas. I am very interested in assisting w/ Safepress. I cloned the repo and took a look a peek at the code and READMEs. I run a small IT LLC called AnalytixBar and I think my partner and I can be helpful to Safepress. You can check out our site (made entirely in-house) at www.analytixbar.com. Right now we are a 2 man team - developer (myself) and my partner who is a designer - we do mainly web apps and reporting/analytics. Our site is hosted on an AWS instance and I actually deployed the old version of our site on the Safe network at safe://analytixbar/ and it looks quite solid w/ a few minor javascript/css issues.

My partner has used Wordpress for some of our recent clients so he is familiar with how it works and I am a decent developer and I see us contributing to the frontend design of UI elements/interactions on safepress for blog and website design tools. Also I noticed a TODO in the readme that mentions "Branding & Graphic Design" which we would be a good fit for us to try. I can also see us overhauling the safepress.io site because no offense, it could use a facelift . How are you hosting it if you don't mind me asking?

[happybeing]

Wow, I'm very pleased you're interested! And thanks for giving me such a helpful intro. and explaining your thoughts about where you might help.

Website
This all sounds good to me, and yes, the safepress.io site was just a quick hack so it would be great if you want to make some improvements, or completely revamp it (I have it on my own shared hosting service so can give you access or I can redirect the domain if you build elsewhere etc.). On a functional level it would be nice to have a blog different team members can easily contribute to, and better integration with social media, forum etc. I just put together what I could with limited time, skill and cost. I'm also thinking that it might be nice to be able to have pretty much the same website on both internet and SAFE - which you already have experience of - but that's not a priority.

Status
The things in the github repo and on http://trello.com/safepress have been unchanged for some months as you probably noticed. This is because we didn't get enough momentum and help for that ambitious vision to keep going. We had a couple of other web guys who were enthusiastic for a while but didn't manage to spend much time on it, and then I realised that until more people were working on it I didn't have the time or skills to carry on with that goal and so shifted my attention to learning javascript and the SAFEnetwork API. I found that working to extend remotestorage.js to support SAFE was a good vehicle for this, which might also have provided a much simpler way to create a basic CMS, or at least editable website. Now we are where we are - just me :slight_smile: - plenty of people who like the idea but can't offer much concrete help - and a big idea (WordPress on SAFE!!!).

Along the way I realised that for myself, and a very large number of others wanting to build things on SAFE, web apps (especially building on top of some existing paradigm like CouchDB or RemoteStorage) would be much more productive than building native apps. So I've been thinking a little broader than SAFEpress, ie helping people build SAFE web apps, rather than just focussing on that.

At the some time, when I think about how to help people create or migrate websites onto SAFE, I'm interested in exploring other quick and effective routes. You'll see a bit of more recent discussion on the google group about using flat file CMS and so on. So that's something I have been thinking about investigating, although my RemoteStorage.js has been taking all my playtime so I haven't progressed that. I have a lot of notes of things to look at (but not in a public place at the moment).

My Role
Looking forward, I don't think I can do a lot in 2017 myself. I think I'm likely to be spending time on personal and family things, but will definitely still be around in the community and can play some role in SAFEpress but not so much in terms of design and build, more in review or general helping people get to grips with SAFE API and so on. I have some experience of website stuff (but quite out of date) and building with WordPress, but not expert level. and I built a lot of software (from embedded to desktop to web - all pre-mobile) in the decades up to 2002, but very little since.

From Here Onwards
So the field here is wide open. I think what you guys can contribute would be a big boost to SAFEpress. When people see things happening: mockups, discussion of ideas, simple prototypes and a few people focussed and with a vision, it can attract them to help out and could well start to take off. I just haven't been able to do enough of that on my own and I'm not an outgoing evangelist, but as you saw, I'm still looking for ways to keep this going :slight_smile:

So please feel free to jump in, create your own vision and direction or pick up what you find that you like and want to build on. Don't feel constrained by what you find there so far. Although I kicked this off, I'm not possessive about the project other than wanting to make it easy for ordinary folk to migrate or create content and or apps that live on SAFE network. There are many ways to do that, and we can use SAFEpress as a brand vehicle for one of them, or as an umbrella to bring like minded folk and projects together in mutual support.

[ja...@analytixbar.com]

Thanks for the reply!  I nabbed the current safepress.io files and uploaded them into my hosting environment - I had a spare domain lying around that I pointed to my environment, you can use this to check out the progress/status - www.indoorfin.us.  I plan to build off of the existing site (at least initially) to minimize dev time. I also plan to keep the overall structure of the current site the same for now, i.e. a single page w/ navbar that scrolls to the different sections.

Our first step for implementing web design changes is to build a mockup and get some input/feedback.  That is what I intend to work on this month to get things going.  I have some changes in mind that I hope will improve the experience of the site.

If anyone has any ideas for a cool functionality or design feature that they would like to see implemented, feel free to add a post and we will consider it!

Happy New Year all!

[ja...@analytixbar.com]

Hey there, sorry for the delay we have been a bit busy this month.  I am attaching our first draft of a mockup for the new SAFEpress.io site - it is a .png file feel free to zoom in if it looks small when you open it.  It includes the main color scheme and sections we plan to include.  It looks quite basic at the moment but we hope to improve it as we go forward with some more pizzaz, JS animations and user interactions.

Take a look and let us know your feedback!

[happybeing]

Thanks for this and asking for feedback. Its a good first draft and nice
that you've maintained the existing features and content. If anything
maybe its too similar! I'm not sure what you plan to add from here, so
I'm curious about improvements you believe can be made, including on
making it something that multiple team members could contribute too
(e.g. using a CMS, and including a blog), and ideally making it
responsive across multiple devices.

For the moment the existing website is adequate, so these are not
pressing, but would I think be valuable when the project gains momentum
on the development side and more people are involved. Getting that is
really the priority, but any improvements to the website would be great
if they have those kind of features ready for when it happens.

So no hurry, and thanks for this. It is great to have you helping out.

Mark

PS Sorry for the delay - I posted by email and it didn't work!

[howevilweare]

Hey Mark!

Thank you for your feedback.  I know it's been quite awhile since my last post - but you know how it works sometimes... We have been quite busy with some client projects so finding time has been a struggle, but I have had SAFE in the back of my mind and my excitement related to this space has not wavered.  

I just wanted to let you know we are working on an updated mockup for this and I should be adding a version for you to check out here sometime next week.

As for a CMS, we think Drupal 8 would be a great choice (quick sidetrack that it's kindof funny to be hosting this site on a CMS that SAFEpress would likely be intending to supplant, but hey I guess we can't host it on internet 3.0 just yet :D).  We have recently used Drupal 8 on a project and it has some great features including:

-free and open source CMS

-extremely flexible and customizable

-community driven modules including a blog module (haven't tested this yet but am very confident it will work very well)

-has great support for translations/internationalization, so we can easily translate the site into other languages as we see fit (as long as we find someone who speaks those languages to write the translated versions of the content!)

My main concern at this point is about hosting options.  There are some great cloud hosting sites with integrated development features for Drupal and Wordpress sites (like Pantheon for example) but they can be a bit pricey - up to $130/month for HTTPS site.  These make development a breeze - I have used Pantheon and I would advocate it in terms of functionality and development tools, but I guess it is a bit cost prohibitive for an open source project.  I haven't done too much research into cheaper options yet - do you happen to have any suggestions?  Is there any sort of funding from the community that can help in such cases?

Best,

Jack

[howevilweare]

Hello,

We have a v2 mockup ready a bit earlier than I thought.  I am attaching it here.  Most of the text content will be completely redone, it is mainly just there for us to see where we plan to have text blocks/titles/etc.

Let me know what you think!

Best,

Jack

[happybeing]

Hey Jack,

Great to hear from you again and thanks for this and your preceding message about Drupal and hosting. To answer the latter first, Drupal would be great. I only dabbled in it but have no reservations about your choice there. Regarding funds, we don't have any :-) so unfortunately I can't ease your hosting situation. My situation is as in my earlier message on this thread (little to no activity this year on SAFEpress) and we don't have a team other than ourselves, but ...

Your mock-up is really impressive. I like it a lot and if you do find a way to get this done we could use it to try and spark some interest in the community - but really I'd be looking for someone to take a lead role because it isn't something I can do. If we had someone with a vision and ability to give the project some energy I'm sure it could attract some funding from the community, but it they would need to be committed enough and able to deliver it on SAFE network. I just mention that to re-iterate that the project is not funded or has a team, really just the vision at this stage - so you can decide what effort / role you want to contribute.

We could also show the mock-up as a way of testing the community interest as it has been out of sight for quite a few months and many people may not be aware of it or the opportunity to work on this.

So, thank you for your work here. I really like what you have created. I'll wait to see what you think about how to use it and so on.

Thank you,

Mark

[howevilweare]

Hey Mark,

I see.  Yes it is tough when a project is just starting off and the resources and funding are not set up yet.

In terms of development, I wonder if there is some way to extend/refactor/port one of the open-source CMS systems (like Drupal) so it will work on the SAFE network.  To stick with the Drupal example, it is open source and can be forked from Github.  As one example there is a project called Backdrop CMS that is a relatively recent Drupal fork.

Drupal is written in PHP.  In the past I did a little research into what the SAFE network is coded in (I believe Rust was mentioned - I've never used it) but don't remember too many more details.  Do you have any idea what it would take to port a PHP application to the SAFE network, or if it is even possible?

To me the main trouble I have connecting the dots is that with any existing CMS out there, it gets set up and hosted on a specific server which is sitting there waiting for web requests to come in.  Then it can do internal processing, generate dynamic HTML templates, and send them to the client.  How would this work on a distributed network (like SAFE) if there is no running application (i.e. the CMS) waiting and listening and processing the requests?  Basically my question is:  How would the SAFEpress app run on the decentralized network in a way that it can actually process incoming requests and serve out web pages?  Is the idea something like Ethereum where the SAFEpress app code can be "saved" to the network and would have built in API calls as a part of it's code to create/delete/interact with individual website repositories that are stored on the network?  Or would it be more of an external application (like SAFE browser) that is registered through SAFE launcher and can interact with the network through API calls?  In the latter case it does seem to make sense that this registered app would be the CMS interface that users could use to build the website and save it to the network, but I still don't understand how it could wait for requests to come in, process them, generate dynamic HTML responses, etc unless the app code is stored in a decentralized way and can be accessed like a smart contract in Ethereum for example.  Any input on this?

As far as resources go, I am in a somewhat unique situation of running an IT consulting startup and have access to some resources (as you can see by the design of the mockup - we spent ~$350 on that) to make contributions to decentralized applications where we can.  These resources include coders, designers, and content creators.  So as you can see I'm willing to leverage my resources (time/limited funds/people) to contribute - I am willing to code in my free time but I have to pay my resources, so if we want to go this route some community funding would be very valuable.  However as far as development goes, we have never attempted a project like this so we could not lead it, but I do feel like we could contribute code it if we had a lead developer from the community to set the path and guide us.

Last thing - a fully featured CMS is a BIG project.  Drupal has been in the works since the early 2000's I believe and has 100's of contributors to Core code and add-on Modules.  I suggest that with minimal resources we might set some realistic goals for this.  Maybe an initial goal would be to allow non-technical users to design a basic 1 page scrolling website based off of a template.  What do you think?  Like you mentioned, maybe we could use the mockup we have as a way to generate some interest in the development community for that.

Woah this message turned out longer than I intended - things just kept coming to mind... :)

Best,

Jack

[happybeing]

Hey Jack,

Thanks for your interest and willingness to commit here, including some hard cash! Starting with your closing point, I think to start simple is good and build incrementally on this, extending in areas that are both feasible and deemed useful and most valuable to users. So a one-page system would be a great start.

I can tell from your questions that you are thinking hard and homing in on the key issues. I did write some initial thoughts about this which you will find in the design on github, sketching out the issues (as you did here) and with some thoughts on solutions. PHP is no-go, and server is no-go, so porting an existing CMS would be both difficult and a major undertaking. On realising that, I began to think in terms of starting from a static website generator, and extending that with editing on the client side, but so that it looks and behaves like a CMS. I began looking for candidates but no further than generating a big list!

For single user I think that approach is fairly straightforward to solve (because really you are only storing data). It is when you go mult-user, or when you allow dynamic content (comments by visitors) that a decentralised implementation becomes very different from a traditional server based CMS. I had some ideas for how to do multi-user, but there were alternatives put forward in forum discussions. One is now an active well funder project to build a forum (code name Decorum) but stalled for now waiting for a live test network with the new API.

So there are already some discussions about how to do this on the SAFE forum (not just with respect to SAFEpress or Decorum), and MaidSafe even produced a demo of a blog with comments where users could visit a website and leave comments, which were then visible to other users. The SAFE API has changed since, but when the next test network is running I expect them to port that and their other examples so they'd be good to try out and examine, to help you get a sense of how to use the SAFE APIs for this kind of web project.

I agree that what SAFEpress most needs right now is a lead developer with skills and time to spearhead things. Attracting people to take a look is therefore where we are right now, so using your web skills to adapt something like the MaidSafe blog demo could be a starting point for that, and building on that to pull templates from a static site generator maybe a follow on (single user site editing but with visitor comments perhaps).

When the test network next goes live I think there will be a significant rise in interest in SAFE network leading to a frenzy not too far in the future - so my suggestion would be to try and get a useful minimal product / demo running on that ASAP and then showing it off and seeing if we can attract some developer interest once a few people are using it to create their websites: "Powered by SAFEpress" labelling etc :-).

Such a demo could be very simple, pull in the MaidSafe comment code, allow selection of some templates and simple editing of one page site content. Everything would be client side HTML/CSS/JavaScript, talking directly to the SAFE DOM API for file editing/storage, DNS reservation and publish. My guess is that you have the skills for this, certainly with some help from myself, the community and even MaidSafe as they would be very keen to help this kind of project if it had a clear and serious goal - even if simple to start with.

So I'm very encouraged that you might be interested in this. If you want help finding the bits and pieces on the forum let me know (or have a look searching for SAFEpress, or "dynamic websites" and "blog with comments"). If you want to look at the MaidSafe blog code I can locate it for you. But be aware that the new API is being finalised right now and documentation is in preparation, whereas the existing code and docs are for the old API so beware going too far into it!

Best wishes and thanks again :-)

Mark

[howevilweare]

Thanks for the info and guidance Mark.

Ok I will take some time and do a little research myself and with some members of my team.  I may need some time to play with the new demos and stuff since it's been awhile since I tested the last ones.

Best,

Jack