Postleaf: Simple & beautiful open source blogging platform.

Hey, everyone. I'm the guy behind Postleaf. Thrilled to see all the love from Product Hunt today! 💙💚 Some of you might remember me from Surreal CMS (www.surrealcms.com), my SaaS that also features inline editing. Postleaf is my first installable product, and it just launched into beta a couple days ago. I built Postleaf because I wanted to "thin down" the blogging experience into a minimal, beautiful, installable application. I had a few key objectives: - Editing should be easy, and Surreal has proven to me that inline is the way to go. I haven't seen any other open source projects do it like this yet, and I really wanted to bring this technology (which has been around for a few years now) to the mainstream. - Themes should be designed, not developed. Handlebars is a well-known templating system. It's extensible and it's a joy to use. Plus, there are variations for just about every possible platform out there. This makes themes portable and not attached to a particular application. - Plugins should compliment the platform, not become an entire app that takes it over. (Note: plugins will launch after the beta, but you can get an idea of where I'm trying to go with this.) - It should be fast! I'm using one of the fastest microframeworks (Slim) and the fastest handlebars rendering engine (LightnCandy) available to PHP. Because we all hate laggy pages! Some of Postleaf's UI is inspired by Ghost <3 Ghost does a lot of things right and I think it's a great platform. However, I chose to use PHP/MySQL over Node or other stacks because it's available pretty much everywhere and so many people are familiar with it. This makes Postleaf much easier to install than a Node app, for example, which I think has been a real pain point for Ghost users. One thing that makes Postleaf really unique is it's ability to produce complete backups. Your database tables are exported into JSON files and wrapped into a single .tar along with your content, themes, and uploads. It also stores relative URLs, so you can migrate an entire site by backing it up, copying a single file to your new server, and restoring it. I've also taken some inspiration from Sublime Text and Atom, where you can press CTRL+P to search for posts, pages, users, tags, etc. It's so convenient, and I'm surprised none of the big players have done this yet. And of course, for those who don't like inline editing (admittedly, it can be a bit distracting if you have a complex theme), there's zen mode, which will turn off all other styles and just show the title/content while you write. It can be toggled on and off with the click of a button. I'll be in and out all day for questions. In the meantime, I'm working on a patch release that fixes some issues users have uncovered with the installer and some other minor things. Oh, and here's the GitHub repo btw: https://github.com/postleaf/ Give it a star if you like it! <3

Cory LaViska

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