Allow us to introduce ourselves. This is the official account of the team behind the BlockPress CMS launched at the SteemFest2 hackathon in Lisbon, 2017. Seven (and a bit) months later and we have released our first beta for user testing.
Team
Our CMS has been developed by @antonchanning and @dana-varahi. We have both enjoyed working on this project a lot and plan to do a whole lot more.
We have a lot more functionality planned, so stay tuned!
Follow @blockpress if you are only interested in the project, as we will resteem all BlockPress related posts with this account, plus add some exclusives, like this one.
Capabilities
What can you currently do with BlockPress? BlockPress is a User Experience driven front end interface first and foremost. It works without backend scripting, which means it can run on any site that supports html, css and javascript. This allows it to run in restricted environments, such as in github pages, ipfs and neocities.
It can be themed and currently comes with four distinct themes. Each supports a set of seven palettes. Custom themes and palettes are simple to make.
And it has a steem-js based javascript module for displaying steem profiles, steem post listings and steem posts and comments. It also has a module for displaying static pages, and can easily be extended for other kinds of content, as this random cat tutorial demonstrates.
What next?
Where do we plan to go from here? Well the following issues are raised for our next release, beta 0.9.1:
- Filtering by user, to allow only posts by approved users, or all posts except banned users, in comments and post listings.
- Add option to show resteems in user blog post listings.
- Allow alternating styles to be applied to comments.
- Automatically load more posts when scrolling.
- Improved accessibility support.
- Tool to help less technical users create a config file.
- Improving themes with transforms and transitions.
These are what we will focus on, although we may take on some lower priority issues as well if it makes sense to do so, or the mood takes us.
We will also re-prioritise if anyone should choose to sponsor a particular feature.
Other important features we intend to add
- A fork combining BlockPress with a nodejs backend. This will allow a lot more flexibility in terms of saving configuration options without the user having to directly edit a config file.
- Use SteemConnect for adding comments, votes, sharing and making new posts, giving BlockPress fully interactive capability.
- Add modules for other blockchain based content. ONO, Everipedia, Whaleshares, and custom EOS based modules for example.
Hosting for delegation.
We plan to introduce hosting for your blockpress based site in return for delegation. We're thinking of 50SP for a single subdomain, with a single page for your blog streem, optionally filtered by a tag. More pages cost extra.
Dana also plans to offer a paid service designing custom themes to meet your requirements.
Coming contests...
We have some up coming contests with SBD rewards already allocated for. If you are an artist, a web designer or a javascript programmer, you may be interested in taking part in some of these...
- Custom palette designers (CSS).
- Custom theme designers (HTML + CSS. Javascipt optional). Shape how BlockPress looks!
- Custom content modules (JavaScript. jQuery optional). What other content can you get BlockPress to display?
- Art. Fan art, mascot, banner.
- Best use of BlockPress. Take BlockPress and put it to use. Lets see what you all can do with it!
