colonel-kurtz

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A block based content editor powered by React. Colonel Kurtz provides a front-end for building pages as a series of blocks, serializing to a JSON data structure.

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Colonel Kurtz

Colonel Kurtz is a content editor written in React. It forces content to be broken up into individual types, such as a photo or chunk of text, and provides a user interface for managing those "blocks" of content, reordering them, and even nesting them inside other content.

Comprehensive documentation can be found under the ./docs directory of this repo. However the content that follows should provide a high level overview:

Data format

Colonel Kurtz can be serialized down to JSON. This structure looks like:

[
  {
    "blocks": [],
    "content": {
      "html": "<p>This is introductory text.<br></p>",
      "text": "This is introductory text."
    },
    "type": "medium"
  },
  {
    "blocks": [
      {
        "blocks": [],
        "content": {
          "src": "http://fizbuz.com/image.jpg"
        },
        "type": "image"
      },
      {
        "blocks": [],
        "content": {
          "html": "<p>Sweet, sweet content.<br></p>",
          "text": "Sweet, sweet content."
        },
        "type": "medium"
      }
    ],
    "type": "section"
  },
  {
    "blocks": [],
    "content": {
      "html": "<p>This is footer text.<br></p>",
      "text": "This is footer text."
    },
    "type": "medium"
  }
]

A block has three important pieces of information:

1. content: A map of information captured about a block. This could be display settings, rich text, etc.
2. type: Blocks are created within a given block type (more on this later). This block type has an identifier which is stored at this key (type). This is used to communicate how content should be displayed and how the editor should expose the content for modification.
3. blocks: A block can have child blocks, stored as an array. The structure of child blocks is exactly the same as top-level blocks.

Configuring

More thorough documentation can be found at ./docs/colonel.md however at a high level, Colonel Kurtz is installed with code loosely following:

var ColonelKurtz = require('colonel-kurtz');

var container = document.querySelector("#container")
var input     = document.querySelector("#input")

var editor = new ColonelKurtz({
  el         : container,
  blocks     : JSON.parse(input.value),
  blockTypes : [{
    id: 'a-block',
    label: 'This is a block',
    component: require('./path/to/react/component')
  }]
});

Changelog

2.12.0

Breaking changes

• Addons are now available directly under colonel-kurtz/addons, their colonel-kurtz/build counterparts have been removed. This is due to a change in the build process to help expose components for use when building new UI.

Noticeable Changes

• New menu items may now be added on an individual block type level. For more information, see ./docs/menus.md
• Style for addons has been moved to ./style/addons so that it is easier to pull down all styles at once or reference the directory in node_modules.

Upgrading

This release has a breaking change to improve the ease of including React components defined by Colonel Kurtz when building new block types. If you are including addons, the following change is necessary:

In the case of the YouTube component addon, in the previous release it can be included using:

let YouTube = require('colonel-kurtz/build/addons/youtube')

This has now become:

let YouTube = require('colonel-kurtz/addons/youtube')