Introducing Prose: A Content Editor for GitHub

btipling 13 years ago |

Wow, the UI on that is gorgeous. I noticed a trend to add features and capability to GitHub which makes a lot of sense because it must have something like millions of users by now and it's something many of here personally use. I'm also working on something for GitHub (a work in progress, http://gitify.me - better notifications). I think we're going to see a lot of growth in the ecosystem around GitHub and tools. Using git and GitHub is going to become more important as time passes by.

For Prose, the front-end architecture makes a great deal of sense, and they must be using a proxy to get around same origin on API requests. I think some server side operations for caching might make sense to enable speed and reduce the number of requests on GitHub.

_mql 13 years ago | |

Glad you like the UI. See Gatekeeper, regarding authentication. https://github.com/prose/gatekeeper

lxbarth 13 years ago | |

> they must be using a proxy to get around same origin on API requests

Actually, the only part that's proxied through a server side app is authentication. GitHub's v3 API supports CORS to the extent Prose uses it.

btipling 13 years ago | | |

Oh that is sweet.

_mql 13 years ago |

Using this thread to extend the discussion about digital content authoring...

Prose relies on Markdown, the current de-facto standard for content authoring on the web.

But what comes after?

If you ask me the answer is clearly: Semantic Rich Text Editing.

So if you like Prose, you might also like the idea of Substance, which is essentially about considering content as data and separating it from presentation. The challenging part here is to come up with web-based tools, that reliably maintain plaintext and annotations separately. Once these tools are ready, a new generation of application for collaborative content composition can be built. The resulting structured content is ready to be analyzed, visualized, turned into arbitrary output formats (PDF,ePub, …) or integrated with other applications.

Imagine Prose, providing WYSIWYG editing in realtime, plus the concept of patches to suggest improvements to a particular document.

Related links:

- http://github.com/substance (see composer, surface, text as well as architecture and document repositories)

- https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/139

So if (and only if) you like that idea, pls support our entry for the Knight News Challenge's data call.

http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25422992783/substance-t...

Or even better, start contributing! :)

Thanks,

Michael

lmm 13 years ago | |

You have it entirely backwards. Markdown is successful precisely because it isn't a semantic format; it's a reaction to overengineered semantic formats like HTML. Markdown is a purely presentational format; asterisks don't represent some abstract notion of emphasis, they denote italic text. The whole point is that you don't "maintain plaintext and annotations separately"; the formatting is part of the text.

_mql 13 years ago | | |

I agree on over-engineered semantic formats. HTML used to be a document representation format. But for me it has turned into a presentation format, with all the DOM manipulation etc. This is perfectly fine, I just had to realize it. Now i just use divs and spans for my layouts, not trying to 'render' semantics. However, on a higher level there should be some document representation formats that can be turned into anything. That's the idea.

Well and I really don't think inline styles / annotations are good.

lmm 13 years ago | | |

>Well and I really don't think inline styles / annotations are good.

Oh but they are. For the vast majority of content creators, semantics are inseparable from presentation; an article I write really does the semantics of looking how it looks, and can't be transformed into something different.

Just like in programming, to extract a good abstraction such as the semantic content of an article you need to test against three different implementations. But most people only write for and test against a single presentation version, so it should be no surprise that even if they try and separate the semantics and the presentation, they'll get it wrong.

reedlaw 13 years ago | |

How will Substance be an improvement on TeX/LaTeX? You can write content in LaTeX and use Pandoc to convert it to just about any other markup language. And it produces beautiful print proofs.

_mql 13 years ago | | |

It's meant to be very strict about semantics (LaTeX actually isn't - it has a lot of style-related commands), and it will be extensible (so you can add your own content types). It's based based on a JSON document model that is describing a series of operations that can be used to reconstruct any document state and also enabling realtime collaboration. Authoring will take place in WYSIWYG-fashion. By having a real data-representation of the document, it can be turned into anything (e.g. LaTeX, PDF, HTML).

We use Pandoc to support a variety of output formats already.

E.g. goto: http://substance.io/michael/data-js and open the export dialogue.

However, we're working on a new architecture (https://github.com/substance/architecture) because we don't want to treat the symptoms of the current implementation and instead fix the problems we've identified at heart.

jashkenas 13 years ago |

Very nice that it's open source. Some of the fun client-side bits appear to be available here:

https://github.com/prose/prose/tree/gh-pages/_includes

te_chris 13 years ago |

I would LOVE to be able to drop this and jekyll into a rails app as a gem (say a standard SaaS app) and serve/manage the about/blog part of the app with this. Is there anything like that?

andyl 13 years ago | |

+1

schrijver 13 years ago |

This is quite awesome… I would love to see support for uploading files though! For a Jekyll based site you also want to be able to put images etcetera in there…

A lot of similar functionality is provided in GitHub’s wiki editor Gollum… which you can use on any git repository, actually. Thought it was quite fun to try out as well.

These solutions get more useful when there are more mixed repositories with code and other content. In our design studio we have all kinds of content usually in our Git: so the standard git viewing interface doesn’t do it justice.

We’ve been trying to hack up a viewer for our git repositories, here is an example: http://osp.schr.fr/work/constant-flyer/view/latest/ the code of the viewer itself is here: http://osp.schr.fr/tools/visualculture/

captn3m0 13 years ago |

I've been working on an obtvse fork that uses github gists as its backend. However, looking at this, I'm thinking of possibly just shifting to a jekyll-like repository base structure, instead of the complex gist+json based stuff I was using.

Thanks for the github.js. I'll try to add gists related stuff to it.

Btw,it didn't work on my iPad. Got to the repo choosing screen,but it gets stuck after I choose a branch, or even if it autoselects master.

_mql 13 years ago | |

We'll do some optimizations for iPad if we get time. However, this would be a great piece for getting involved. One blocker I see is that CodeMirror does not work well with iPad touch events yet.

filiwickers 13 years ago | |

I created a Svbtle/Obtvse clone (in terms of styling) that uses Jekyll Bootstrap if you are interested (https://github.com/joehand/joehand.github.com). I took some liberties in terms of functionality to suit my needs.

Definitely love using Prose.io with it. It has made my writing process much simpler.

lysol 13 years ago |

Just tried this out with my own crackpot Markdown based static site generator and it works like a champ. What a pleasant surprise!

minhajuddin 13 years ago |

How easy is it to integrate with other git providers or git from my own servers? Jekyll is not the best for content management and has its own drawbacks. But, this is something orthogonal to Jekyll, in that it call be used to edit any git files. Definitely looking forward to tinkering with this :)

craigmccaskill 13 years ago |

Does this work with hosted jekyll sites or just those that live within github? The documentation only mentions github, but after a quick look at the source code I can't see any reason this wouldn't work (at least with some minor modifications) on any hosted jekyll blog.

edwinyzh 13 years ago |

Wonderful! The Ctrl + Shift + Left/Right key is handy.

Would you add an option to show a live preview side by side?

I'm a big fan of live preview, that's why I'm evening developer LIVEditor (my live html/css/js coder at http://liveditor.com)

bretthardin 13 years ago |

Feature Request: SEO stuff

One thing I miss about wordpress was the SEO plugins to look at my article, heading, meta, etc. This is the only thing I actually miss from wordpress. However, I miss it so much, I am thinking of going back. Please save me this frustration.

_mql 13 years ago | |

SEO is totally up to the website developer. The version Google sees is a generated static version of your Jekyll-site specification (layouts, posts, configuration etc.).

So SEO is not in the scope of the project.

yuchi 13 years ago | |

Sorry but prose is only an advanced markup editor for your GH repos. You're probably missing the point here.

SudarshanP 13 years ago |

How are you guys making the Explanation videos like the one on the prose website or the the substance.io website? Is it some open source tool where you can provide the strings or just low level flash tweens or some thing?

samrat 13 years ago |

Does Github's support for Jekyll mean that Github automatically "publishes" a blog post? I'm using something similar(Pelican), and I know I can't publish a post using Prose only, is that different for Jekyll sites?

sprice 13 years ago |

I've been wanting a tool like this for some time. I've considered migrating simple websites running on a CMS into Jekyll but the lack of content editing for "humans" has always been the blocker.

phleet 13 years ago |

This is really cool. And a little bit depressing that the typography in the preview is better than the typography on my actual site. I should really fix that.

_mql 13 years ago | |

Hehe. ;) No worries, feel free to pick some styles, if helpful.

csmeder 13 years ago |

Why is it asking for permission to my private repositories? Is it possible to try this with only giving access to my public repos?

bretthardin 13 years ago | |

Github doesn't give the option for "read-only" on private repos. This is something I have struggled with at my startup.

_mql 13 years ago | |

Can you create an issue on Github and describe the problem step-by-step? There might be some edge cases we haven't covered yet.

http://github.com/prose/prose

sakai 13 years ago |

Since nobody has said it yet... the Development Seed team is awesome. First MapBox, now this. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

cwilson 13 years ago |

This looks amazing, but for some reason my private organization owned repo isn't showing up. Anyone else have this problem?

why-el 13 years ago | |

I am a member of a public organization and I don't know how to access one of its repos with this.

cedrichurst 13 years ago | | |

It uses backbone routers, so try something like:

http://prose.io/#MyOrganization/my-repo

Worked for me.

why-el 13 years ago | | |

Thanks. I ended up creating an issue for this and they mentioned a url like yours, except that I needed to append a master at the end, like @BHSPitMonkey suggested bellow.

BHSPitMonkey 13 years ago | | |

Note: You also need "/master" at the end, or whichever branch you intend to work on.

yatsyk 13 years ago |

It doesn't work with files from HNResources.com for some reason. Are textile files supported?

_mql 13 years ago | |

There's only support for Markdown right now, but you should be able to edit any textfile in a repository. There might be some remaining flaws though, so please submit issues and help us fix them.

ashot 13 years ago |

doesn't work with organization accounts

_mql 13 years ago | |

Planned feature: https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/120 For now, please enter the URL manually to access repos that live within organisations.

http://prose.io#:org/:repo/:branch

In future we'll also allow browsing user and organisation profiles by accessing:

http://prose.io#:user http://prose.io#:org

Need to find out if there's a way to fetch the default branch, so you can just

http://prose.io#:org/:repo

daulex 13 years ago |

This is outstanding.

The ui is beautiful.

So what about code highlighting?

_mql 13 years ago | |

https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/140

Killswitch 13 years ago |

Love love love this. Awesome work!

kalimatas 13 years ago |

Just awesome!

wseymour 13 years ago |

Fantastic work. I've been toying with a CMS backed by a Git repository on-and-off for a while, and this sets a great precedent.

Very impressed by the way you've pushed all of the interesting bits to the client side.