bootstrap-blog

Node.js Blog Engine

The goal of this project is to create a simple, reusable blog template for Node.js. By passing in a few options, you can quickly have a fully functioning blog, including WYSIWYG editing, database saving, Disqus comments, draft saving options, and a responsive Twitter Bootstrap theme.

Live Example

You can go to http://nodejs-blog-engine-example.herokuapp.com/ to view the example site. To login as the admin, go to http://nodejs-blog-engine-example.herokuapp.com/login. For the example website, any Google account will have admin access.

Installation

Warning! This is still being developed!!! But, if you want to help out in development, you can install it with:

npm install bootstrap-blog

Simple Usage

The following code should be placed in your main serverside javascript file that is executed with node. For example, if this is placed in app.js, then node app.js would run the blog.

var blog = require('bootstrap-blog');
 
blog.start({
    title: "My awesome blog",
    adminGoogleEmail: '[e-mail]',
    liveDomain: 'http://some-app.herokuapp.com',
    database: { //Access information for a SQL database. If you need a free one to get started with, try http://xeround.com/
        database: config.database,
        user: config.user,
        password: config.password,
        host: config.host,
        dbPort: config.dbPort
    }
});

Options

Menu Items

Custom menu items can be set by passing in an array of menu objects.

    menu: [
        {
            title: 'Google',
            path: 'http://www.google.com'
        }, {
            title: 'Amazon',
            path: 'http://www.amazon.com'
        }
    ]

Custom Pages

If you want to create a custom page (not a blog posting), use the pages property.

pages:[
        {
            path: '/about',
            callback: function (req,res) {
                console.log('User has visitied the about page.');
                res.send('About page coming soon!');
            }
        },
        {
            path: '/about/history',
            callback: function (req,res) {
                console.log('User has visitied the history page.');
                res.send('History page coming soon!');
            }	
        }
    ]

Different Bootstrap Themes

You can load in any Twitter Bootstrap theme by specifying the path to the css file.

bootstrapPath: '/css/bootstrap.min.css'

Modifying templates

When you run the blog for the first time, a views folder is created in your top directory. Edit these files to change the layout of the website. Since these are outside the node_modules folder, they will not be overridden during updates.

Example

var blog = require('bootstrap-blog');
 
blog.start({
    title: "My awesome blog",
    adminGoogleEmail: '[e-mail]',
    localPort: 5000, //defaults to 3000
    liveDomain: 'http://some-app.herokuapp.com',
    database: {
        database: config.database,
        user: config.user,
        password: config.password,
        host: config.host,
        dbPort: config.dbPort
    },
    bootstrapPath: '/css/bootstrap.min.css',
    pages:[
        {
            path: '/about',
            callback: function (req,res) {
                console.log('User has visitied the about page.');
                res.send('About page coming soon!');
            }
        },
        {
            path: '/about/history',
            callback: function (req,res) {
                console.log('User has visitied the history page.');
                res.send('History page coming soon!');
            }	
        }
    ],
    menu: [
        {
            title: 'Google',
            path: 'http://www.google.com'
        }, {
            title: 'Amazon',
            path: 'http://www.amazon.com'
        }
    ]
});

Contributing

Pull requests welcome!