apostrophe

Apostrophe

Apostrophe is a content management system. This core module provides rich content editing as well as essential services to tie Apostrophe to your Express application.

In addition to rich text, Apostrophe allows you to add rich media to documents. Apostrophe also includes simple facilities for storing your rich content areas in MongoDB and fetching them back again.

You can try a live demo of the Apostrophe Wiki sample app here. (Note: the demo site resets at the top of the hour.)

Apostrophe introduces "widgets," separate editors for rich media items like photos, videos, pullquotes and code samples. Apostrophe's widgets handle these items much better than a rich text editor on its own.

Apostrophe also supports floating content properly, including wrapping text around images and video. Unlike other rich text editors, Apostrophe addresses the usability problems that go with floating content. Apostrophe users can see exactly where to add text above the floated element and where to add text after it so that it wraps around. When editing, Apostrophe displays positioning arrows before and after rich media elements that make it clear where they connect to the text and ensure it is always possible to add content above and below them. Apostrophe users can also easily select, cut, copy and paste rich content widgets exactly as if they were part of the text, without breaking them. You can even copy a video widget from one page of a site to another.

In summary, Apostrophe's rich media widgets are independently edited, but they are also part of the flow of a rich text document, with robust support for floating them if desired and displaying them at various well-chosen sizes rather than arbitrary sizes that may not suit your design. This is the major advantage of Apostrophe over other rich text editors.

Apostrophe also provides server-side node.js code providing a back end for all of the above: storing uploaded files, validating rich content, and storing rich content areas in MongoDB.

Who are we?

Apostrophe is led by the team at P'unk Avenue. Previously we created Apostrophe 1.5, a well-regarded content management system based on the Symfony framework for PHP. This Node-based version of Apostrophe is a complete rewrite, benefitting on everything we've learned since.

Acknowledgements

Apostrophe wouldn't be nearly so awesome without nunjucks, Express and Rangy. Please don't go anywhere near HTML's contentEditable attribute without Rangy. And a hip flask.

Requirements

Apostrophe is intended to work in all major browsers from IE7 up, with best results in modern browsers such as recent versions of Firefox and Chrome. Of course the content you create with Apostrophe could work with any browser.

Apostrophe's server-side components are built in Node and require Express 3.0. Although in principle browser-side components of Apostrophe could talk to other languages, right now a close partnership with Node code on the server is driving the flow of development.

Apostrophe's server-side code uses uploadfs to store media files. uploadfs allows you to decide whether to keep them in a local filesystem, Amazon S3 or a custom backend.

Apostrophe does not require any external CSS framework. Apostrophe's internal templates are processed with Nunjucks, which is awesome, but your Node application does not have to use Nunjucks.

You must have the following on your development and production servers:

node, of course mongodb, on your local machine (or edit wiki.js to point somewhere else) imagemagick, to resize uploaded images (specifically the convert command line tool)

Mac developers can install imagemagick via MacPorts. Your production server will need it too; it's probably a simple apt-get install or yum command away. Heroku includes imagemagick as standard equipment.

Adding Editable Areas With Apostrophe: A Simple Example

Configuring Apostrophe

You'll need to npm install the node-apostrophe npm package in your project, as well as uploadfs, mongodb and express. You might consider using http://github.com/punkave/appy, which eases the burden of setting up a typical Express app that supports all the usual stuff. But it's not a requirement.

Here's the initApos function of the sample application http://github.com/punkave/aposwiki. Notice this function invokes a callback when it's done. wiki.js makes good use of the async module to carry out its initialization tasks elegantly.

function initApos(callback) {
  return apos.init({
    files: appy.files,
    areas: appy.areas,
    pages: appy.pages,
    app: app,
    uploadfs: uploadfs,
    permissions: aposPermissions,
  }, callback);
}

"What are appy.files, appy.areas and appy.pages?" MongoDB collections. You are responsible for connecting to MongoDB and creating these three collection objects, then providing them to Apostrophe. (Hint: it's pretty convenient with Appy.) For best results, areas and pages should both have a unique index on the slug property. The areas collection is used for independent areas, while the pages collection is handy when areas should be logically grouped together (consider the "main" and "sidebar" content areas of a webpage, for instance). Apostrophe's getArea, putArea and getPage methods make all that easy for you as you'll see below.

"What is app?" app is your Express 3.0 app object. See the Express documentation for how to create an application. Again, Appy helps here.

"What is uploadfs?" http://github.com/punkave/uploadfs is a module that conveniently stores uploaded files in either the local filesystem or S3, whichever you like. See wiki.js for an example of configuration. You'll create an uploadfs instance, initialize it and then pass it in here.

"What is aposPermissions?" A function you define to decide who is allowed to edit content. If you skip this parameter, Apostrophe allows everyone to edit everything - not safe in production of course, but convenient in the early development stages.

To understand configuration in detail, you should really check out wiki.js. Please don't suffer without reading that simple and well-commented example.

Making Sure Apostrophe Is In The Browser

Before we can add rich content areas to a webpage with Apostrophe, we need to make sure Apostrophe's CSS, JavaScript and widget editor templates are present in the page. Apostrophe adds convenience functions to your template language to accomplish that without a fuss.

You will also need to make appropriate browser-side JavaScript calls to enable the "edit" buttons of areas and to enable video players in Apostrophe content.

Here's a simple layout.html Nunjucks template that includes everything Apostrophe needs:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    {{ aposStylesheets() }}
    <link href="/css/my.css" rel="stylesheet" />
    {{ aposScripts() }}
  </head>
  <body>
    {% block body %}
    {% endblock %}
    {{ aposTemplates() }}
  </body>
  <script type="text/javascript">
    // Wait for domready!
    $(function() {
      apos.enableAreas();
      apos.enablePlayers();
    });
  </script>
</html>

Note the body block, which can be overridden in any template that extends this template. Jade has an identical feature.

"What if I hate the way you're loading CSS and JavaScript? What if I hate the version of jQuery you're loading?" Don't use the convenience functions. Instead examine Apostrophe's scripts.html and stylesheets.html templates and make sure you are loading the same functionality.

"Do I have to load all this stuff if I am certain the user has no editing privileges?" No. To make your pages lighter, if you know the user won't be editing, you can get by with just content.css, jQuery and content.js. We haven't spent much time testing this scenario yet. Pull requests to make it more convenient are welcome.

Adding Editable Areas To Your Templates

The easiest way to add Apostrophe-powered editable rich content areas to your Node Express 3.0 project is to use Apostrophe's aposArea function, which is made available to your Express templates when you configure Apostrophe. Here's a simple example taken from the aposwiki sample application:

{{ aposArea({ slug: 'main', items: main, edit: true }) }}

This is from a Nunjucks template. If you're using Twig, you'll write:

!= aposArea({ slug: 'main', items: main, edit: true })

Sometimes Apostrophe's default set of controls include features that don't make sense in a sidebar or otherwise don't suit a design. In these cases you can limit the list.

This aposArea call turns on all of the controls. You can leave anything you like off the controls list:

{{ aposArea({ slug: 'main', items: main, edit: true, controls: [ 'style', 'bold', 'italic', 'createLink', 'image', 'video', 'pullquote', 'code' ] }) }}

"What does slug mean?" Each area needs a unique "slug" to distinguish it from other editable content areas on your site. Many sites have slugs named header, footer, sidebar and the like.

"Where does items come from?" Good question. You are responsible for fetching the content as part of the Express route code that renders your template. You do this with Apostrophe's getArea and getPage methods.

Naturally getArea is asynchronous:

app.get('/', function(req, res) {
  apos.getArea('main', function(err, area) {
    return res.render('home', { content: area ? area.items : [] });
  });
});

Note the code that checks whether area is actually set before attempting to access its content. If no area with that slug has ever been saved, the area callback parameter will be null.

Also note that there is an err parameter to the callback. Real-world applications should check for errors (and the wiki.js sample application does).

Grouping Areas Into "Pages"

"What if I'm building a site with lots of pages? Each page might have two or three areas. Is there an efficient way to get them all at once?"

Sure! Apostrophe provides a getPage method for this purpose.

If you pass the slug /about to getPage, and areas exist with the following slugs:

/about:main
/about:sidebar
/about:footer

Then getPage will fetch all of them and deliver an object like this:

{ 
  slug: '/about', 
  areas: { 
    main: { 
      slug: '/about/:main', 
      content: 'main content'
    } 
    sidebar: { 
      slug: '/about/:sidebar', 
      content: 'sidebar content'
    } 
    footer: { 
      slug: '/about/:sidebar', 
      content: 'footer content'
    } 
  } 
}

"Those page objects look useful. Can I store other stuff in those? Page titles and so forth?" Yes. You can write your own mongo code to set additional properties on the objects in the pages collection. Apostrophe won't mind.

Apostrophe's putArea and getArea methods are written to automatically spot slugs containing a ":" and update or fetch an area within the areas property of a page in the pages collection, rather than creating a freestanding area object in the areas collection.

The apostrophe-wiki sample application uses this method to deliver complete Wiki pages:

app.get('*', function(req, res) {
  var slug = req.params[0];
  apos.getPage(slug, function(e, info) {
    return res.render('page.html', { 
      slug: info.slug, 
      main: info.areas.main ? info.areas.main.items : [], 
      sidebar: info.areas.sidebar ? info.areas.sidebar.items : []
    });
  });
});

This is a simplified example. The actual code in wiki.js uses middleware to summon the page and footer information into the req object. There are two middleware functions, one for the page contents and one for a globally shared footer. It's a good strategy to consider. Perhaps we'll add some standard middleware functions like this soon:

app.get('*', 
  function(req, res, next) {
    // Get content for this page
    req.slug = req.params[0];
    apos.getPage(req.slug, function(e, info) {
      if (e) {
        console.log(e);
        return fail(req, res);
      }
      if (!info) {
        info = { slug: slug, areas: {} };
      }
      req.page = info;
      return next();
    });
  },
  function(req, res, next) {
    // Get the shared footer
    apos.getArea('footer', function(e, info) {
      if (e) {
        console.log(e);
        return fail(req, res);
      }
      req.footer = info;
      return next();
    });
  },
  function (req, res) {
    return res.render('page.html', { 
      slug: req.slug, 
      main: req.page.areas.main ? req.page.areas.main.items : [], 
      sidebar: req.page.areas.sidebar ? req.page.areas.sidebar.items : [],
      user: req.user,
      edit: req.user && req.user.username === 'admin',
      footer: req.footer ? req.footer.content : ''
    });
  }
);

Now page.jade can call aposArea to render the areas:

{{ aposArea({ slug: slug + ':main', items: main, edit: true }) }}
{{ aposArea({ slug: slug + ':sidebar', items: sidebar, edit: true }) }}

Enforcing Permissions

You can hide edit buttons by passing edit: false to the aposArea function, and you should if the user doesn't have that privilege. But that doesn't actually prevent clever users from making form submissions that update areas. By default, everyone can edit everything if they know the URL.

Of course this is not what you want. Fortunately it is very easy to pass your own custom permissions callback to Apostrophe.

When calling init(), just set the permissions option to a function that looks like this:

function permissions(req, action, fileOrSlug, callback) { ... }

Once you've decided whether req.user should be allowed to carry out action, invoke callback with null to let the user complete the action, or with an error to forbid the action.

Currently the possible actions are edit-area and edit-media. edit-area calls will include the slug of the area as the third parameter. edit-media calls for existing files may include a file object retrieved from Apostrophe's database, with an "owner" property set to the _id, id or username property of req.user at the time the file was last edited. edit-media calls with no existing file parameter also occur, for new file uploads.

A common case is to restrict editing to a single user:

function permissions(req, action, fileOrSlug, callback) {
  if (req.user && (req.user.username === 'admin')) {
    // OK
    return callback(null);
  } else {
    return callback('Forbidden');
  }
}

You can see an example of this pattern in wiki.js.

Extending Apostrophe

You can extend apos with additional widgets, and the apostrophe-twitter and apostrophe-rss modules provide working examples. New widget types can even have custom loaders that bring in additional data on the server side as needed. It's neat stuff.

Roadmap

Apostrophe is a work in progress. Certainly the following things need to improve:

• Developers should be able to leverage everything else in Apostrophe without actually storing areas via the provided API. In particular, if I'm creating a blog post editor, I want an area to be part of it, but I don't want to store it separately or be forced to have a separate "save" button for it.
• Developers should be able to inject their own storage layer that satisfies an API. I think. Maybe. (Requiring MongoDB has its benefits.)
• The built-in oembed proxy should cache thumbnails and markup.
• The built-in oembed proxy should have a whitelist of sites whose oembed codes are not XSS attack vectors.
• Server-side content validation should be much smarter.
• It should be possible to fetch summaries of areas conveniently and quickly. The new way of storing items as a structured array in MongoDB makes this possible, but a simple API for it should be exposed.
• It should be possible to fetch just certain rich media from areas conveniently and quickly (technically possible now, see above).
• Server-side renders should be cached, for a minimum lifetime equal to that of the widget with the shortest cache lifetime.
• A separate module that complements Apostrophe by managing "pages" in a traditional page tree should be developed.

Conclusion and Contact Information

That's it! You should have everything you need to enable rich content editing on your sites. If not, open an issue on github and we'll talk. See also the above roadmap.

Tom Boutell

[e-mail]

P'unk Avenue

http://github.com/punkave/apostrophe

@boutell

justjs.com