6 ms·

Introducing Prose: A Content Editor for GitHub

214 points by brunosan 14y ago

jashkenas 14y ago
Very nice that it's open source. Some of the fun client-side bits appear to be available here: https://github.com/prose/prose/tree/gh-pages/_includes https://github.com/prose/prose/tree/gh-pages/_includes
btipling 14y ago
Wow, the UI on that is gorgeous. I noticed a trend to add features and capability to GitHub which makes a lot of sense because it must have something like millions of users by now and it's something many of here personally use. I'm also working on something for GitHub (a work in progress, http://gitify.me http://gitify.me - better notifications). I think we're going to see a lot of growth in the ecosystem around GitHub and tools. Using git and GitHub is going to become more important as time passes by. For Prose, the front-end architecture makes a great deal of sense, and they must be using a proxy to get around same origin on API requests. I think some server side operations for caching might make sense to enable speed and reduce the number of requests on GitHub.
- lxbarth 14y ago
  > they must be using a proxy to get around same origin on API requests Actually, the only part that's proxied through a server side app is authentication. GitHub's v3 API supports CORS to the extent Prose uses it.
  - btipling 14y ago
    Oh that is sweet.
- _mql 14y ago
  Glad you like the UI. See Gatekeeper, regarding authentication. https://github.com/prose/gatekeeper https://github.com/prose/gatekeeper
sprice 14y ago
I've been wanting a tool like this for some time. I've considered migrating simple websites running on a CMS into Jekyll but the lack of content editing for "humans" has always been the blocker.
captn3m0 14y ago
I've been working on an obtvse fork that uses github gists as its backend. However, looking at this, I'm thinking of possibly just shifting to a jekyll-like repository base structure, instead of the complex gist+json based stuff I was using. Thanks for the github.js. I'll try to add gists related stuff to it. Btw,it didn't work on my iPad. Got to the repo choosing screen,but it gets stuck after I choose a branch, or even if it autoselects master.
- _mql 14y ago
  We'll do some optimizations for iPad if we get time. However, this would be a great piece for getting involved. One blocker I see is that CodeMirror does not work well with iPad touch events yet.
- filiwickers 14y ago
  I created a Svbtle/Obtvse clone (in terms of styling) that uses Jekyll Bootstrap if you are interested (https://github.com/joehand/joehand.github.com https://github.com/joehand/joehand.github.com). I took some liberties in terms of functionality to suit my needs. Definitely love using Prose.io with it. It has made my writing process much simpler.
csmeder 14y ago
Why is it asking for permission to my private repositories? Is it possible to try this with only giving access to my public repos?
- _mql 14y ago
  Can you create an issue on Github and describe the problem step-by-step? There might be some edge cases we haven't covered yet. http://github.com/prose/prose http://github.com/prose/prose
- bretthardin 14y ago
  Github doesn't give the option for "read-only" on private repos. This is something I have struggled with at my startup.
Killswitch 14y ago
Love love love this. Awesome work!
ashot 14y ago
doesn't work with organization accounts
- _mql 14y ago
  Planned feature: https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/120 https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/120 For now, please enter the URL manually to access repos that live within organisations. http://prose.io#:org/:repo/:branch http://prose.io#:org/:repo/:branch In future we'll also allow browsing user and organisation profiles by accessing: http://prose.io#:user http://prose.io#:user http://prose.io#:org http://prose.io#:org Need to find out if there's a way to fetch the default branch, so you can just http://prose.io#:org/:repo http://prose.io#:org/:repo
cwilson 14y ago
This looks amazing, but for some reason my private organization owned repo isn't showing up. Anyone else have this problem?
- why-el 14y ago
  I am a member of a public organization and I don't know how to access one of its repos with this.
  - cedrichurst 14y ago
    It uses backbone routers, so try something like: http://prose.io/#MyOrganization/my-repo http://prose.io/#MyOrganization/my-repo Worked for me.
    - BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
      Note: You also need "/master" at the end, or whichever branch you intend to work on.
    - why-el 14y ago
      Thanks. I ended up creating an issue for this and they mentioned a url like yours, except that I needed to append a master at the end, like @BHSPitMonkey suggested bellow.
kalimatas 14y ago
Just awesome!
yatsyk 14y ago
It doesn't work with files from HNResources.com for some reason. Are textile files supported?
- _mql 14y ago
  There's only support for Markdown right now, but you should be able to edit any textfile in a repository. There might be some remaining flaws though, so please submit issues and help us fix them.
phleet 14y ago
This is really cool. And a little bit depressing that the typography in the preview is better than the typography on my actual site. I should really fix that.
- _mql 14y ago
  Hehe. ;) No worries, feel free to pick some styles, if helpful.
craigmccaskill 14y ago
Does this work with hosted jekyll sites or just those that live within github? The documentation only mentions github, but after a quick look at the source code I can't see any reason this wouldn't work (at least with some minor modifications) on any hosted jekyll blog.
wseymour 14y ago
Fantastic work. I've been toying with a CMS backed by a Git repository on-and-off for a while, and this sets a great precedent. Very impressed by the way you've pushed all of the interesting bits to the client side.
te_chris 14y ago
I would LOVE to be able to drop this and jekyll into a rails app as a gem (say a standard SaaS app) and serve/manage the about/blog part of the app with this. Is there anything like that?
- andyl 14y ago
  +1
lysol 14y ago
Just tried this out with my own crackpot Markdown based static site generator and it works like a champ. What a pleasant surprise!
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
bretthardin 14y ago
Feature Request: SEO stuff One thing I miss about wordpress was the SEO plugins to look at my article, heading, meta, etc. This is the only thing I actually miss from wordpress. However, I miss it so much, I am thinking of going back. Please save me this frustration.
- yuchi 14y ago
  Sorry but prose is only an advanced markup editor for your GH repos. You're probably missing the point here.
- _mql 14y ago
  SEO is totally up to the website developer. The version Google sees is a generated static version of your Jekyll-site specification (layouts, posts, configuration etc.). So SEO is not in the scope of the project.
sakai 14y ago
Since nobody has said it yet... the Development Seed team is awesome. First MapBox, now this. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
_mql 14y ago
Using this thread to extend the discussion about digital content authoring... Prose relies on Markdown, the current de-facto standard for content authoring on the web. But what comes after? If you ask me the answer is clearly: Semantic Rich Text Editing. So if you like Prose, you might also like the idea of Substance, which is essentially about considering content as data and separating it from presentation. The challenging part here is to come up with web-based tools, that reliably maintain plaintext and annotations separately. Once these tools are ready, a new generation of application for collaborative content composition can be built. The resulting structured content is ready to be analyzed, visualized, turned into arbitrary output formats (PDF,ePub, …) or integrated with other applications. Imagine Prose, providing WYSIWYG editing in realtime, plus the concept of patches to suggest improvements to a particular document. Related links: - http://github.com/substance http://github.com/substance (see composer, surface, text as well as architecture and document repositories) - https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/139 https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/139 So if (and only if) you like that idea, pls support our entry for the Knight News Challenge's data call. http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25422992783/substance-towards-open-digital-publishing http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25422992783/substance-t... Or even better, start contributing! :) Thanks, Michael
- reedlaw 14y ago
  How will Substance be an improvement on TeX/LaTeX? You can write content in LaTeX and use Pandoc to convert it to just about any other markup language. And it produces beautiful print proofs.
  - _mql 14y ago
    It's meant to be very strict about semantics (LaTeX actually isn't - it has a lot of style-related commands), and it will be extensible (so you can add your own content types). It's based based on a JSON document model that is describing a series of operations that can be used to reconstruct any document state and also enabling realtime collaboration. Authoring will take place in WYSIWYG-fashion. By having a real data-representation of the document, it can be turned into anything (e.g. LaTeX, PDF, HTML). We use Pandoc to support a variety of output formats already. E.g. goto: http://substance.io/michael/data-js http://substance.io/michael/data-js and open the export dialogue. However, we're working on a new architecture (https://github.com/substance/architecture https://github.com/substance/architecture) because we don't want to treat the symptoms of the current implementation and instead fix the problems we've identified at heart.
SudarshanP 14y ago
How are you guys making the Explanation videos like the one on the prose website or the the substance.io website? Is it some open source tool where you can provide the strings or just low level flash tweens or some thing?
edwinyzh 14y ago
Wonderful! The Ctrl + Shift + Left/Right key is handy. Would you add an option to show a live preview side by side? I'm a big fan of live preview, that's why I'm evening developer LIVEditor (my live html/css/js coder at http://liveditor.com http://liveditor.com)
minhajuddin 14y ago
How easy is it to integrate with other git providers or git from my own servers? Jekyll is not the best for content management and has its own drawbacks. But, this is something orthogonal to Jekyll, in that it call be used to edit any git files. Definitely looking forward to tinkering with this :)
daulex 14y ago
This is outstanding. The ui is beautiful. So what about code highlighting?
- _mql 14y ago
  https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/140 https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/140
schrijver 14y ago
This is quite awesome… I would love to see support for uploading files though! For a Jekyll based site you also want to be able to put images etcetera in there… A lot of similar functionality is provided in GitHub’s wiki editor Gollum… which you can use on any git repository, actually. Thought it was quite fun to try out as well. These solutions get more useful when there are more mixed repositories with code and other content. In our design studio we have all kinds of content usually in our Git: so the standard git viewing interface doesn’t do it justice. We’ve been trying to hack up a viewer for our git repositories, here is an example: http://osp.schr.fr/work/constant-flyer/view/latest/ http://osp.schr.fr/work/constant-flyer/view/latest/ the code of the viewer itself is here: http://osp.schr.fr/tools/visualculture/ http://osp.schr.fr/tools/visualculture/
samrat 14y ago
Does Github's support for Jekyll mean that Github automatically "publishes" a blog post? I'm using something similar(Pelican), and I know I can't publish a post using Prose only, is that different for Jekyll sites?

214 points by brunosan 14y ago

Very nice that it's open source. Some of the fun client-side bits appear to be available here: https://github.com/prose/prose/tree/gh-pages/_includes https://github.com/prose/prose/tree/gh-pages/_includes

btipling 14y ago

Wow, the UI on that is gorgeous. I noticed a trend to add features and capability to GitHub which makes a lot of sense because it must have something like millions of users by now and it's something many of here personally use. I'm also working on something for GitHub (a work in progress, http://gitify.me http://gitify.me - better notifications). I think we're going to see a lot of growth in the ecosystem around GitHub and tools. Using git and GitHub is going to become more important as time passes by. For Prose, the front-end architecture makes a great deal of sense, and they must be using a proxy to get around same origin on API requests. I think some server side operations for caching might make sense to enable speed and reduce the number of requests on GitHub.

lxbarth 14y ago
> they must be using a proxy to get around same origin on API requests Actually, the only part that's proxied through a server side app is authentication. GitHub's v3 API supports CORS to the extent Prose uses it.
- btipling 14y ago
  Oh that is sweet.
_mql 14y ago
Glad you like the UI. See Gatekeeper, regarding authentication. https://github.com/prose/gatekeeper https://github.com/prose/gatekeeper

sprice 14y ago

I've been wanting a tool like this for some time. I've considered migrating simple websites running on a CMS into Jekyll but the lack of content editing for "humans" has always been the blocker.

captn3m0 14y ago

I've been working on an obtvse fork that uses github gists as its backend. However, looking at this, I'm thinking of possibly just shifting to a jekyll-like repository base structure, instead of the complex gist+json based stuff I was using. Thanks for the github.js. I'll try to add gists related stuff to it. Btw,it didn't work on my iPad. Got to the repo choosing screen,but it gets stuck after I choose a branch, or even if it autoselects master.

_mql 14y ago
We'll do some optimizations for iPad if we get time. However, this would be a great piece for getting involved. One blocker I see is that CodeMirror does not work well with iPad touch events yet.
filiwickers 14y ago
I created a Svbtle/Obtvse clone (in terms of styling) that uses Jekyll Bootstrap if you are interested (https://github.com/joehand/joehand.github.com https://github.com/joehand/joehand.github.com). I took some liberties in terms of functionality to suit my needs. Definitely love using Prose.io with it. It has made my writing process much simpler.

csmeder 14y ago

Why is it asking for permission to my private repositories? Is it possible to try this with only giving access to my public repos?

_mql 14y ago
Can you create an issue on Github and describe the problem step-by-step? There might be some edge cases we haven't covered yet. http://github.com/prose/prose http://github.com/prose/prose
bretthardin 14y ago
Github doesn't give the option for "read-only" on private repos. This is something I have struggled with at my startup.

Killswitch 14y ago

Love love love this. Awesome work!

ashot 14y ago

doesn't work with organization accounts

_mql 14y ago
Planned feature: https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/120 https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/120 For now, please enter the URL manually to access repos that live within organisations. http://prose.io#:org/:repo/:branch http://prose.io#:org/:repo/:branch In future we'll also allow browsing user and organisation profiles by accessing: http://prose.io#:user http://prose.io#:user http://prose.io#:org http://prose.io#:org Need to find out if there's a way to fetch the default branch, so you can just http://prose.io#:org/:repo http://prose.io#:org/:repo

cwilson 14y ago

This looks amazing, but for some reason my private organization owned repo isn't showing up. Anyone else have this problem?

why-el 14y ago
I am a member of a public organization and I don't know how to access one of its repos with this.
- cedrichurst 14y ago
  It uses backbone routers, so try something like: http://prose.io/#MyOrganization/my-repo http://prose.io/#MyOrganization/my-repo Worked for me.
  - BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
    Note: You also need "/master" at the end, or whichever branch you intend to work on.
  - why-el 14y ago
    Thanks. I ended up creating an issue for this and they mentioned a url like yours, except that I needed to append a master at the end, like @BHSPitMonkey suggested bellow.

kalimatas 14y ago

Just awesome!

yatsyk 14y ago

It doesn't work with files from HNResources.com for some reason. Are textile files supported?

_mql 14y ago
There's only support for Markdown right now, but you should be able to edit any textfile in a repository. There might be some remaining flaws though, so please submit issues and help us fix them.

phleet 14y ago

This is really cool. And a little bit depressing that the typography in the preview is better than the typography on my actual site. I should really fix that.

_mql 14y ago
Hehe. ;) No worries, feel free to pick some styles, if helpful.

craigmccaskill 14y ago

Does this work with hosted jekyll sites or just those that live within github? The documentation only mentions github, but after a quick look at the source code I can't see any reason this wouldn't work (at least with some minor modifications) on any hosted jekyll blog.

wseymour 14y ago

Fantastic work. I've been toying with a CMS backed by a Git repository on-and-off for a while, and this sets a great precedent. Very impressed by the way you've pushed all of the interesting bits to the client side.

te_chris 14y ago

I would LOVE to be able to drop this and jekyll into a rails app as a gem (say a standard SaaS app) and serve/manage the about/blog part of the app with this. Is there anything like that?

andyl 14y ago
+1

lysol 14y ago

Just tried this out with my own crackpot Markdown based static site generator and it works like a champ. What a pleasant surprise!

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

bretthardin 14y ago

Feature Request: SEO stuff One thing I miss about wordpress was the SEO plugins to look at my article, heading, meta, etc. This is the only thing I actually miss from wordpress. However, I miss it so much, I am thinking of going back. Please save me this frustration.

yuchi 14y ago
Sorry but prose is only an advanced markup editor for your GH repos. You're probably missing the point here.
_mql 14y ago
SEO is totally up to the website developer. The version Google sees is a generated static version of your Jekyll-site specification (layouts, posts, configuration etc.). So SEO is not in the scope of the project.

sakai 14y ago

Since nobody has said it yet... the Development Seed team is awesome. First MapBox, now this. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

_mql 14y ago

Using this thread to extend the discussion about digital content authoring... Prose relies on Markdown, the current de-facto standard for content authoring on the web. But what comes after? If you ask me the answer is clearly: Semantic Rich Text Editing. So if you like Prose, you might also like the idea of Substance, which is essentially about considering content as data and separating it from presentation. The challenging part here is to come up with web-based tools, that reliably maintain plaintext and annotations separately. Once these tools are ready, a new generation of application for collaborative content composition can be built. The resulting structured content is ready to be analyzed, visualized, turned into arbitrary output formats (PDF,ePub, …) or integrated with other applications. Imagine Prose, providing WYSIWYG editing in realtime, plus the concept of patches to suggest improvements to a particular document. Related links: - http://github.com/substance http://github.com/substance (see composer, surface, text as well as architecture and document repositories) - https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/139 https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/139 So if (and only if) you like that idea, pls support our entry for the Knight News Challenge's data call. http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25422992783/substance-towards-open-digital-publishing http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25422992783/substance-t... Or even better, start contributing! :) Thanks, Michael

reedlaw 14y ago
How will Substance be an improvement on TeX/LaTeX? You can write content in LaTeX and use Pandoc to convert it to just about any other markup language. And it produces beautiful print proofs.
- _mql 14y ago
  It's meant to be very strict about semantics (LaTeX actually isn't - it has a lot of style-related commands), and it will be extensible (so you can add your own content types). It's based based on a JSON document model that is describing a series of operations that can be used to reconstruct any document state and also enabling realtime collaboration. Authoring will take place in WYSIWYG-fashion. By having a real data-representation of the document, it can be turned into anything (e.g. LaTeX, PDF, HTML). We use Pandoc to support a variety of output formats already. E.g. goto: http://substance.io/michael/data-js http://substance.io/michael/data-js and open the export dialogue. However, we're working on a new architecture (https://github.com/substance/architecture https://github.com/substance/architecture) because we don't want to treat the symptoms of the current implementation and instead fix the problems we've identified at heart.

SudarshanP 14y ago

How are you guys making the Explanation videos like the one on the prose website or the the substance.io website? Is it some open source tool where you can provide the strings or just low level flash tweens or some thing?

edwinyzh 14y ago

Wonderful! The Ctrl + Shift + Left/Right key is handy. Would you add an option to show a live preview side by side? I'm a big fan of live preview, that's why I'm evening developer LIVEditor (my live html/css/js coder at http://liveditor.com http://liveditor.com)

minhajuddin 14y ago

How easy is it to integrate with other git providers or git from my own servers? Jekyll is not the best for content management and has its own drawbacks. But, this is something orthogonal to Jekyll, in that it call be used to edit any git files. Definitely looking forward to tinkering with this :)

daulex 14y ago

This is outstanding. The ui is beautiful. So what about code highlighting?

_mql 14y ago
https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/140 https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/140

schrijver 14y ago

This is quite awesome… I would love to see support for uploading files though! For a Jekyll based site you also want to be able to put images etcetera in there… A lot of similar functionality is provided in GitHub’s wiki editor Gollum… which you can use on any git repository, actually. Thought it was quite fun to try out as well. These solutions get more useful when there are more mixed repositories with code and other content. In our design studio we have all kinds of content usually in our Git: so the standard git viewing interface doesn’t do it justice. We’ve been trying to hack up a viewer for our git repositories, here is an example: http://osp.schr.fr/work/constant-flyer/view/latest/ http://osp.schr.fr/work/constant-flyer/view/latest/ the code of the viewer itself is here: http://osp.schr.fr/tools/visualculture/ http://osp.schr.fr/tools/visualculture/

samrat 14y ago

Does Github's support for Jekyll mean that Github automatically "publishes" a blog post? I'm using something similar(Pelican), and I know I can't publish a post using Prose only, is that different for Jekyll sites?