Dropplets - A simple database-less CMS

by alwaysunday • 13 years ago

150 98 13 years ago

Mods - I think this should be "CMS" (content management system) instead of "CRM" (customer relationship manager), as it's a blogging tool.

alwaysunday• 13 years ago

Thanks for catching that. Was an early morning.

robbfitzsimmons2• 13 years ago

No worries! It actually got me to click; I was curious how one would accomplish that for a CRM, something that is nothing but a database.

phaer2• 13 years ago

Maybe "blogging tool" would be the correct description, a cms is should support much more than just one content type.

yogo2• 13 years ago

Exactly. From just scanning the website my impression was Wordpress without a DB dependency. Even though Wordpress is used a lot as a CMS and this might eventually take that route they are clearly pushing blogging.

testing12341234• 13 years ago

Apparently the author would agree with you. The front page reads, "Dropplets is not a CMS, it's just for pure blogging and nothing more which is a good thing."

aw3c2• 13 years ago

All I see is a link to a zip and a link to "http:///"?

d0ugal2• 13 years ago

The link is all JavaScripty, or you can just scroll down. I'm not keen on that UI.

xauronx• 13 years ago

The presentation is awesome. Super clean, I love the logo and the video's that let you know just what this thing is. The blurbs of text were enough to get me interested enough to watch the video. The videos were clean and to the point. Damn, for me this is what all landing pages for projects like this should be. I'm not sure if I'll use your product but I'll certainly bookmark the page to learn from later.

d0ugal2• 13 years ago

Code - https://github.com/circa75/dropplets

potomak• 13 years ago

Nice design, next step, a mobile friendly CSS.

reidrac• 13 years ago

"Dropplets is compatible with most server configurations [...]". Requires PHP (at least), I guess none of my servers has a common configuration :)

EDIT: the installation part in the README.md needs some extra info. Like it requires PHP and some file/directory permissions.

sterlingross• 13 years ago

In case anyone is curious, it seems you need to add full write access to the root install directory as the config.php file is added there.

jc4p• 13 years ago

Quick link to demo: http://dropplets.com/demo/

dubcanada• 13 years ago

I thought this had something to do with Drupal. I guess not :)

jh3• 13 years ago

Especially since the drop is blue.

yogo2• 13 years ago

My only recommendation would be to use the new password api going forward and password_compat for versions less than 5.5. I don't see a php version requirement in their docs though.

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

One could argue that in this case the server's file system acts as the database.

dkuntz28• 13 years ago

That's true of any flat-file system... But, I agree.

Touche• 13 years ago

Anyone looked at the code and see how this works? When you publish does it generate html or does it do it for each GET?

dkuntz28• 13 years ago

There isn't any caching. But, everything other than the index page can be generated fairly quickly, because you're not making database calls, only file system calls.

The index page could take a little longer.

Regardless, it's fairly quick, but it generates the output on each request. Which is to be expected, almost every other tool that isn't manually generated is the same.

mcovey• 13 years ago

The code is unfortunately written in straight procedural PHP. It is kind of spaghetti code. The end result is quite pretty, but it ignores all of the best practices in PHP development right now.

Also the last time I tried to set it up, it required that I have a twitter account.

testdrive52• 13 years ago

Can someone please tell me how this is different from Jekyll? They both work based on the same concept if I'm correct?

Also, how about support for category pages? I mean, show a page full of posts from one particular category only? Possible??

dkuntz28• 13 years ago

They work on completely different concepts:

Jekyll requires you to generate your site. Dropplets generates pages on each request.

Jekyll runs on your machine, and is written in Ruby. Dropplets runs on your server, and is written in PHP.

Jekyll's posts require very minimal metadata, and use a key/value pairing system with YAML. Dropplets' posts require a ton of metadata, and the same metadata for every post, and in a specific order, and you can't add arbitrary metadata.

----

I don't think Dropplets has categories, but I may be mistaken.

testdrive52• 13 years ago

Thanks, that was very kind of you.

fmitchell0• 13 years ago

looks great! definitely will have to try this out.

it's a little discouraging, however, that the issue queue has so many pull requests, comments, etc. without comment.

i love the concept of simplicity and i'm sure the maintainers have a roadmap in mind. it'd be nice if that was communicated a bit so i can know how simple they plan to keep it.

andyhmltn• 13 years ago

Just a note: Chrome 24 on Ubuntu and the videos aren't autoplaying. I have to right click + play. Would be nice to show some controls :)

dombili2• 13 years ago

This looks promising. I'm gonna give this a try since I'm looking for a simple and lightweight CMS for my blog. Speaking of which, anyone have any recommendations about that (apart from Jekyll)? I still haven't found what I'm looking for and I'm on the verge of coding my own blog in plain HTML instead of just installing something like Wordpress but that may be a pain in the ass to manage once I have more than handful of posts on my host.

But who knows, maybe Dropplets is the one.

dkuntz28• 13 years ago

I started playing with Anchor last week. I like it thus far, because it really focuses on blogging, something WordPress kinda deemphasized two years ago.

Plus, it's pretty. Which is always a nice bonus.

----

If you're not averse to paying for something, Statamic looks really awesome.

dombili2• 13 years ago

They both look pretty good, thanks for the suggestions!

As long as its price is reasonable, I don't mind paying for a CMS, but it looks like Anchor fit to my needs better than Statamic. All I want from a CMS is to have its own search and markdown support. That's it. I don't care much about themes and all that. I'm perfectly fine with having white background and black text on top of it centered on the page as a "theme".

phaer2• 13 years ago

You might find something on http://staticgen.com/

dkuntz28• 13 years ago

Having tried it out before, I found the format used for blog posts to be incredibly arbitrary. It requires your twitter username for every post, and a bunch of other things. Plus, instead of using key/value pairings with yaml or something similar, it required that your headers be in a specific order.

It seems cool, it also seems like a little bit of work could be put into making it more accessible to people who didn't write it.

ohwp• 13 years ago

A small rant: I think it is bad practice to hide content below the page height. I just wanted to close the website because I thought 'nothing to see here' before I accidentally scrolled and more content was revealed.

dkuntz28• 13 years ago

There's a learn more button...

crazygringo• 13 years ago

It has really faint text semi-transparent text on a semi-transparent background which is covered by a Twitter icon, at least in my Chrome with my browser height.

If I zoom out all the way, there's still no indication you can scroll down, because the page "helpfully" hides everything from you.

It's pretty bad.

swift• 13 years ago

I read this comment before actually going to the site, which is fortunate, because I'm certain I would've missed the rest of the content if you hadn't pointed that out.

I rarely complain about design issues on websites but this a case where things should really be changed.

davidlumley• 13 years ago

You're talking about 'The Fold' and it's a myth - http://blog.kissmetrics.com/why-the-fold-is-a-myth/

It doesn't really matter if there's content below the page height, just that you ensure users see they have the affordance to scroll.

cl3m• 13 years ago

It is powered by PHP. They probably feel ashamed as they don't say it anywhere on the webpage ;-) Seems nice tough!

pioul2• 13 years ago

The concept and simplicity make me think of Ghost's (http://ghost.org/features/): free, open source, near-minimalist, and self-hosted.

The seemingly only advantage is that Dropplets doesn't require a database, and its landing page is amazingly beautiful, clear, and to the point (though Ghost's "features" page is slick as well).

On a more technical note, click events seem to be propagated up the player on the landing page, closing it when toggling HD for example.

dkuntz28• 13 years ago

But, Dropplets doesn't have a built in post editor, and requires that your posts contain lots of required metadata, and in a really arbitrary order.

pioul2• 13 years ago

Yes, Ghost is, at least to me, superior in numerous ways, and especially for that awesome editor, but I also believe it depends on usage.

xux• 13 years ago

It's closed for signup... that's annoying.

wmeredith2• 13 years ago

Yep. It's also not self-hosted. Other than the fact that these are both CMS's with modern design on their landing pages, I don't see the correlation. They're very different types of software.

unicornporn2• 13 years ago

But Ghost uses node.js which almost nobody can actually host themselves, because the hosting that people already pay for doesn't (and perhaps wont) support it. Node may be hip and all, but PHP still seems like the right choice for something as simple as blogging software to me.

chc• 13 years ago

Almost nobody? A $5 virtual host can run Node.js.

justinavery• 13 years ago

Exactly why we put together hostghost.io, to make it simple to use ghost without the headaches of the hosting.

GotNothing• 13 years ago

So is the marketplace going to be open to developer/designers as well?

corywatilo2• 13 years ago

Amazing. Since the dissolution of Posterous, I've been looking for something simple and easy. And with the theming abilities, it looks like it might just be perfect for me. Can't wait to give it a try today!

corywatilo2• 13 years ago

Side note: I love how this has been in development since at least February (when the Twitter was launched). Too many half-baked projects get posted to HN the weekend they're launched and then never end up progressing much further. The fact that this has been in the works for a while gives me the confidence to try it, knowing this isn't as fly-by-night as a Show HN weekend project.

trevordixon• 13 years ago

I like Pico (http://pico.dev7studios.com/).

adambard• 13 years ago

It looks really good, but I hate a lot about the demo theme. Why does anything move without me doing anything? Will the annoying bottom bar always be there? What if I can't find a high-res artsy photo? Was it necessary to knock off Medium's (distinctive) menu icon?

sequoia2• 13 years ago

warning: typical HN nitpicking (I know, typical, but it was just my first reaction upon seeing the code & I want to be honest).

I looked at the code and my first impression wasn't good. These are minor issues but such "smells" are red flags (to mix metaphors) and warn me away from the codebase

https://github.com/circa75/dropplets/blob/master/index.php#L...

    } else if($_GET['filename'] == 'rss' || $_GET['filename'] == 'atom') {

why would you set a get var called "filename" to request an RSS feed? There is no actual file called `rss`, so it's not a file name. So the filename get var is really maybe a file name, maybe some other non-file resource being requested. This is confusing & unintuitive, makes the code harder to read & parse.

https://github.com/circa75/dropplets/blob/master/index.php#L...

    $posts = ($pagination_on_off != "off") ? array_slice($all_posts,$offset,($posts_per_page > 0) ? $posts_per_page : null) : $all_posts;

too many ternaries!! Why are you testing against a specific string ("false") to indicate a boolean value? This is a major smell as it suggests the author doesn't know the proper use of basic PHP data types.* Why are you adding a ternary if to test posts_per_page size rather than just setting it to `null` to indicate "all posts" in the first place? How can pagination be true with unlimited posts per page anyway? Make posts_per_page null by default, remove redundancy in pagination config var name, make it a bool, and you're left with:

    $posts = $paginate ? array_slice($all_posts, $offset, $posts_per_page) : $all_posts;

I don't mean to condemn the efforts of the author: everyone starts somewhere and this looks like a pretty dang cool project, but smells like these make me walk away immediately because they indicate this code is going to be confusing and hard to work with. One last one: functions.php. This will send a cold chill down the spine of any PHP dev familiar with the bad old days. Group code logically, write reusable modules, and use namespaces (well skip this last one if you want to support old/cheap hosting)! No need to code like its PHP 4 anymore :)

* Yes I see that it's a user defined setting in settings.php or config.php and an argument could be made that a user would understand "on"/"off" more easily than true/false, but this is a trivially solved by a comment & would make the code more robust and readable. More robust because string comparison in PHP is case sensitive, so if the user sets the setting to "OFF" it will effectively be "on." Boolean solves this.

bndr2• 13 years ago

I'm actually the one that wrote the last two nasty parts of code, not the author himself. I'm really sorry that it confused you.

I actually don't remember why I wrote them like that, but I'm pretty sure I had a reason (at least I think I do..)

Again, sorry about that.

TylerE5• 13 years ago

And this is how PHP hell begins.

egsec• 13 years ago

Looks nice, nothing new - https://github.com/kolber/stacey - http://bolt80.com/piecrust/

The video was down for me, but maybe the uploader makes it easier then some other systems? When I try to teach non tech people to use a db-less CMS with no online admin, they get Markdown (they can at least copy and paste my example pages). But uploading files, WinSCP, FileZilla, etc and opening its NOT in word... this blows their minds. So if anyone has seen the uploader and it makes it super simple, it might be worth checking out.

rzimmerman• 13 years ago

This is very nice looking, but I have to nitpick about the "30 second" install. It takes 30 seconds, assuming you've already installed an operating system, a webserver, PHP, and set everything up securely. For a beginner that is really non-trivial. Still better than Wordpress, though.

NegativeK2• 13 years ago

Yes, that's definitely a nitpick.

krapp5• 13 years ago

Certainly, learning to use Composer (http://getcomposer.org) to manage the packages such as PHPass and Markdown and autoload will clean up a lot of the mess, also updating packages is as easy as running a shell command (or even in my case a batch file..)

I'm a bit worried about the amount of mixedin html and php I see too -- one of the benefits of sticking with an existing templating system (though people will say that's superfluous since PHP is a templating system) is that data passed into templates can be automatically escaped, whereas just mixing in adds the possibility of an xss issue.

It also looks like he's using index.php pages as a way to protect his files possibly? I think he need to look into proper .htaccess protection and url routing - ensure that only predetermined urls can even resolve to anything.

Overall it looks interesting and there's definitely a place for it conceptually but as others have pointed out, the style of PHP is a bit behind what's considered best practice. Still, that can be easily fixed.

pearjuice2• 13 years ago

This project its architecture would benefit greatly when leveraged by a framework like Laravel.

krapp5• 13 years ago

I was thinking Slim, but yes -- a framework would definitely help.

pearjuice2• 13 years ago

Laravel is slim. :-)

grimmdude• 13 years ago

Looks like a nice system. Coincidentally I've been working on something similar, albeit a little more on the simple side: http://www.grimmdude.com/2013/08/22/jebson-cms

hawkharris• 13 years ago

I love the design, concept and copy, but will someone please explain what Dropplets uses in lieu of a database? (I may have missed something, but I don't think that was explained in detail.)

babby2• 13 years ago

You apparently upload full .md files straight to the server via a frontend interface, it seems.

jasonsc• 13 years ago

Since there seems to be some discussion about the code quality for Dropplets, I just wanted to clarify that Dropplets is really just a proof of concept. I'm not a developer, nor do I want to be. I'm good at creating concepts like Dropplets, but that's where my skills as a developer ends. I decided to publish Dropplets with the hope that developers that actually knew what they were doing would help me take the concept to the next level. I stated this on Dropplets.com as well.

jamesgeck0• 13 years ago

I tried to set this up a few months ago. Apparently I was formatting post headers incorrectly, because I couldn't get any posts I wrote to show up on the site after upload. No error messages or anything.

It's pretty, but the workflow isn't much better than Jekyll. I would have been happy if there was a post editor in the admin panel, but that's apparently not going to happen.

oddshocks• 13 years ago

This is actually sort of cool-looking.

DigitalSea2• 13 years ago

Looking over the comments I want to say I am surprised the attitude of some people towards this project, but given this is Hacker "Hate On PHP" News, I am not. I am disappointed to see people nitpicking over the way some things have been coded. As someone who's used Dropplets on a couple of small sites now, I've found it to be a breath of fresh air compared to Wordpress.

Not only is Dropplets a lot more simple to work with compared to other CMS's/blogging platforms written in PHP, it works. It's easy to write themes for it, it's easy to publish content and easy to make it do whatever you want. It's perfect for those times when you want something lightweight that isn't bloated Wordpress.

So I am going to surprise you all by not weighing in on the dick-measuring contest that is language comparison. You can write bad code in any language, PHP just makes it easier to do so. I think this is a great project and if you have a problem with the way it's coded, remember it's open source and anyone can contribute.

This is the other problem with a lot of people that frequent this site, but not limited to this site. They're quick to complain and point out problems with other peoples code and their choice of language, but rarely ever put their keyboard where their mouth is and actually bother to make a difference by contributing to an open source project.

So my advice to anyone who came here to comment on the choice of PHP or the way it's coded would be to take it elsewhere and learn to compliment someone else's work. It's attitudes like the ones I am seeing that make people (like the author of this project) not want to release their work as open source because people are far too critical and judgemental of others.

krapp5• 13 years ago

Not everyone who's criticizing the code is necessarily hating on PHP. There is a difference between good PHP and bad PHP and perfectly valid reasons to suggest things need to be changed.

And I believe people have been contributing, at least, issues have been opened up and at least one commenter has mentioned rewriting (possibly forking) it.

laurent123456• 13 years ago

There's good code being written in PHP, but as far as I can see, not really in this project. JS, HTML, PHP are all mixed together, global functions and variables everywhere, no classes or objects.

Also they are not using an existing PHP framework so they'll have to reinvent the wheel many times for proper session handling, caching, encryption, and for countless other problems that have already been solved.

DigitalSea2• 13 years ago

Once again, it's open source we are talking about here. You do realise the problems you describe are also prevalent in other content management systems and publishing platforms? Wordpress is the worse offender for global variables, the theming system in Wordpress mixes HTML,CSS,JS and PHP together, the code-base is a mixture of object-oriented and procedural code as well. But it powers most of the web. Any blog you visit is most likely powered by Wordpress and why is that? Because it works.

Dropplets might not have the prettiest code, but there aren't many projects out there that do. In-fact, Dropplets is no worse than Wordpress is and that hasn't stopped Wordpress being hugely successful. Why? Most people don't care how things are coded if they work. Dropplets works, Wordpress works. If it works, who cares really? As a developer, I don't care, I'm not a code purist. My clients don't care either if I use Wordpress or Dropplets for their site.

Frameworks do have the added advantage of giving you things like encryption, database abstraction and a structure to adhere to, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to do things for yourself, sometimes understanding things on a lower-level makes you a better developer. Besides, the overhead of a PHP framework would be too much for a project like Dropplets in my opinion. Considering it's database-less, you don't need any database abstraction, ORM, no custom-built session management or complicated caching libraries.

Even a framework as light as Codeigniter would be far too heavy to build something like Dropplets on-top of. And people need to realise the future of PHP is not within frameworks, the Composer package manager means we can include what we want in our projects like a framework without the added overhead: include only what you need and ignore everything else.

I was hoping to avoid a framework, language, code-quality discussion but I guess it's fair people raise their hands after I question the intent of the comments on this submission. At the end of the day, good code is important, but as developers we know that it just isn't possible to write good code all of the time without help.

This highlights why open source is important and I think if people truly care about good code, they should roll up their sleeves and help. You can't deny Dropplets is pretty-darn cool. Not nearly enough people contribute to projects like this. I've forked the project and am planning on helping clean up the code-base a little bit if it means more people will use it.

I thought the whole point of open source was getting your ideas and work out there so others can improve it, not criticise it. If we spent all of our time perfecting something, most open source projects in existence would probably not exist. Sometimes it's best to get something that works, but isn't exactly coded to God-like developer levels out into the public. Criticism stems open source. We need to embrace imperfection and achieve perfection as a whole over time.

ams6110• 13 years ago

With no database, you can install Dropplets in seconds on any server, compose offline using markdown, then simply upload to publish.

Cool, sounds almost as easy as writing html and deploying it with ftp. We've come full circle to 1996.

exo_duz• 13 years ago

Not sure if it's the same for everyone or not but I'm having issues playing the videos on Chrome.

The videos either just stay on the Dropplet background with the music playing, or it just goes away. In all this the BG music keeps playing though like it's playing like normal.

marcamillion• 13 years ago

This looks awesome. Kudos to the author for doing this. Not a big fan of PHP, but I love everything else about this project - from a product perspective.

Not getting into the code.

I tried playing with the demo and the 'admin panel' (by pressing the dropplet icon in top left) didn't show up for me in Chrome on Windows 7.

The screen moved slightly to the right (say 2 px) so I knew it was supposed to move...but it didn't go the full way.

Not sure why that is.

Edit: It looks like some sort of JS error:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'create' of undefined measureIt.js:120 (anonymous function) measureIt.js:120

brymaster• 13 years ago

Old always becomes new again. 10-15 years ago this was called Newspro/Coranto by early bloggers.

contextual• 13 years ago

Promising CMS. Installs in a snap. Any new templates being released soon? The cupboard is bare.

Dropplets - A simple database-less CMS

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