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Husky CMS

Use a Trello board as a CMS to create & manage a website.

Features

  • Use Trello cards to represent the pages, blog posts and projects on your site
  • Pages render the markdown in your card's description
  • Setup a blog, which is a Trello list, then quickly add and author posts
  • Showcase projects, which is a different Trello list, then filter and view them
  • Configurable structure, showing only the pages you want
  • Content caching so you don't get rate limited and page loads are fast
  • Plugin system for dynamically adding your own page types
  • Setup a timeline, which is a Trello list, then add events and milestones

Table of contents

Setup

Prerequisites

  • Know how to use docker & docker-compose
  • A Trello account and board to author your content
  • Understand JSON

Steps

  1. Get a Trello authentication key & token
  2. Get your TRELLO_APP_KEY from trello.com/app-key
  3. Using your key, get your TRELLO_TOKEN from https://trello.com/1/authorize?expiration=never&scope=read&response_type=token&name=Husky%20CMS&key=__YOUR_KEY_HERE__
  4. Make a Trello board for your site's content
    • Add 5 lists: Draft, Pages, Blog, Projects and get the ids for them
      • Open a card on the list you want to get the id of
      • Add .json onto the end of the url & reload
      • Copy the text and paste it into a JSON formatter
      • Find the value for idList in the parsed json
  5. Create a docker-compose.yml using your auth and the ids of those lists
version: '3'

services:
  redis:
    image: redis:4-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped

  husky-site:
    image: openlab/husky-cms:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
    environment:
      SITE_NAME: FancySite
      OWNER_NAME: AwesomeCompany
      OWNER_LINK: link_to_website
      REDIS_URL: redis://redis
      TRELLO_APP_KEY: your_trello_app_key
      TRELLO_TOKEN: your_trello_app_key
      PAGE_LIST: list_id_for_pages
      PROJECT_LIST: list_id_for_projects
      BLOG_LIST: list_id_for_blog_posts
      TIMELINE_LIST: list_id_for_timeline
      TIMELINE_DATE_ID: custom_field_id

  1. Run docker-compose up -d

  2. Visit localhost:3000

  3. Add cards to your board and see how the site changes

Configuring

You can set different combinations of lists. If you just have PROJECT_LIST, BLOG_LIST or TIMELINE_LIST set, the site will just contain that page. If you have PAGE_LIST set, the site will show multiple pages.

Important – When using PAGE_LIST, Husky uses a card named Home as the root page of your site.

Branding

To replace site name with your brand use CUSTOM_BRAND_URL to point to image of your logo.

To replace timeline marker with your custom image use CUSTOM_TIMELINE_MARKER_URL to point to your marker.

Page options

Blog, timeline and project pages have extra environment variables to configure their render.

BLOG_SLUG, TIMELINE_SLUG & PROJECT_SLUG are used to determine the url basis for the page and sub pages.

BLOG_NAME, TIMELINE_NAME & PROJECT_NAME is used for the navigation name. You can set to empty string, '', to hide the page from navigation.

BLOG_TITLE, BLOG_SUBTITLE, TIMELINE_TITLE, TIMELINE_SUBTITLE, PROJECT_TITLE & PROJECT_SUBTITLE configure the bulma hero on the page. Again you can set to an empty string, '', to hide the hero.

Multi page mode

If you want more that one of a blog, timeline or project page you can set BLOG_LIST, TIMELINE_LIST or PROJECT_LIST to a comma separated list of ids instead of just one. For example 'FIRST_ID,SECOND_ID,THIRD_ID'

When in multi-page mode, each list id becomes a root-level page with the index added on the end. For example, /projects_1, /projects_2 and /projects_1. You can combine this with setting PROJECT_NAME, TIMELINE_NAME BLOG_NAME to an empty string '', to hide all the pages from the navigation.

Timeline

Timeline uses Custom Fields Power-Ups and Date custom field. If using free version of Trello you can only use ONLY one Power-Up on a board.

Setup timeline

  • Enable Custom Fields Power-Up on your board
  • Add New Field named Date with type Date
  • Add card with Date to Timeline list and open it
  • Add .json onto the end of the url & reload
  • Copy the text and paste it into a JSON formatter
  • Find the value for idCustomField for Date in the parsed json

If you want to add milestones to your timeline then add a card with no Date parameter set. The title of the card will be rendered as milestone on the timeline.

Plugins

Husky uses plugins to add different page types, for examples see server/modules. To add your own plugins, mount them in with a docker volume.

volumes:
  - ./my_plugin.js:/app/plugins/my_plugin.js
  - ./my_template.pug:/app/plugins/templates/my_template.pug

There are two types of plugin, Page plugins & Content plugins.

Page plugins

A page plugin adds a type of page to Husky, optionaly rendered if it's variables are set. It'll appear in the nav along the top, or at the root if just this page's variables are set.

Here's an example page plugin, my_plugin.js

function route(ctx) {
  const message = process.env.MESSAGE
  ctx.renderPug('my_template', 'My Page', { message })
}

module.exports = function(husky, utils) {
  husky.registerPage('my_page', {
    name: 'My Page',
    templates: ['my_template'],
    variables: ['MESSAGE'],
    routes: {
      './': route
    }
  })
}

And its corresponding template, my_template.pug

.hero.is-large.is-primary
  .hero-body
    .container
      h1.title Page says: #{message}

This adds a custom page type, my_page, which shows when the MESSAGE environment variable is set. If only the MESSAGE variable is set, it will be the only page, / otherwise it will be at /my_page and appear as My Page.

The pug template is rendered inside the site skeleton, which has the theme loaded along with the nav bar and footer above and below it.

Your plugin should expose a single function via module.exports, which takes a husky instance and utils object as parameters.

If you want to serve static files, you can always mount them into /app/static.

Routing

Husky uses Koa under the hook and modifies its context:

field type use
ctx.sitemode string If the site is serving a specific page or any
ctx.skipCache bool Whether to skip using the trello cache i.e. ?nocache
ctx.pages card[] The page cards from the list with id PAGE_LIST
ctx.sitetree node[] The sitetree nodes for the active pages
ctx.husky husky The husky reference

It also adds these methods for rendering / errors

ctx.renderPug(template, title, data)
ctx.notFound()

Content plugins

A content plugin lets your customise how a card is rendered into html.

let pageviews = {}

module.exports = function(husky, utils) {
  husky.registerContentType('pageviews', {
    parser: card => {
      if (!pageviews[card.id]) {
        pageviews[card.id] = 0
      }

      return `<p> Page views: ${++pageviews[card.id]}`
    },
    order: 75
  })
}

This registers a plugin which adds the pageviews at the bottom of each page. Here is the available config:

By default each blob is wrapped in a <div class="content-TYPE">, where TYPE is your plugin name.

field type use
parser func The parser function, takes a card and returns html
order number Where to put this content, 0 being earlier, 100 later
noWrapper boolean If you don't want the content to be wrapped in a div

Ordering

The ordering numbers are arbitrary and are rendered lowest first. The card's markdown is rendered at order 50, so less than that will be before the markdown and more than that will be after.

Fetching cards

Husky periodically fetches cards from Trello and puts them into redis at a predefined interval. Internally this uses the husky.fetchCards(listId) method.

Whenever you call this method, husky will remember your listId and periodically fetch new cards.

The default interval is 5000 milliseconds but you can override this by setting the POLL_INTERVAL environment variable. Set it to the number of milliseconds you want to wait between fetches.

let cards = await husky.fetchCards('your_list_id')

Development

Setup

To develop on this repo you will need to have Docker and node.js installed on your dev machine and have an understanding of them. This guide assumes you have the repo checked out and are on macOS, but equivalent commands are available.

You'll only need to follow this setup once for your dev machine.

# Setup your ENV, using the same environment variables from above
cp .env.example .env

Regular use

These are the commands you'll regularly run to develop the API, in no particular order.

# Startup a development redis database
# -> Runs on port 6379 on localhosts
docker-compose up -d

# Startup the dev server
# > This will watch for changes in /app and rebuild js/sass assets
# > This will NOT watch js for changes in /server, you need to restart it for that
# > This will recompile .pug templates when NODE_ENV=development is set in your .env
npm run dev

# Deploy docker images
# > Uses REGISTRY file & package version to tag the image and push to dockerhub
# > More info: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/version
npm version # major | minor | patch

# Stop the development redis database
# -> Do this after you stop development
docker-compose stop

Irregular use

These are commands you might need to run but probably won't, also in no particular order.

# Generate js and css assets using parcel-bundler
# -> Writes them to the dist/ folder
npm run build

# Generate the table of contents for this readme
# -> It'll replace content between the toc-head and toc-tail HTML comments
npm run gen-readme-toc

# Manually lint code with Eslint
npm run lint

# Manually format code
# -> This repo is setup to automatically format code on git-stage
npm run prettier

# Run the application in production
# -> This is the entrypoint in the docker image
# -> It assumes assets are built into dist/
npm run start

Environment

The server behaves differently depending on what NODE_ENV is set

development

Run with npm run dev

  • .pug files will be compiled for each request, so you always get the latest version
  • Requests to trello will not be cached
  • .js & .sass assets will be hot-reloaded, meaning they will update in the browser on save

production

Run with npm run start

  • .pug files will be compiled once at startup
  • .js & .css assets will be optimised and minimised

Code formatting

This repo uses Prettier to automatically format code to a consistent standard. It works using the husky and lint-staged packages to automatically format code whenever code is commited. This means that code that is pushed to the repo is always formatted to a consistent standard.

You can manually run the formatter with npm run prettier if you want.

Prettier is slightly configured in .prettierrc.yml and also ignores files using .prettierignore.

Building the docker image

This repo uses an npm postversion script to automatically build a version of the docker image whenever the npm version changes. This is designed to be used with the npm version command so all docker images are semantically versioned.

Archiving

If you want to archive a husky-cms site, here's a blog post which shows how you can do that

Ideas & further work

  • Display card's attachments, for example:
    • A carousel of images
    • A preview of a git repo
    • Embedding a youtube video
  • Use linked cards to nest pages and create a page hierarchy
  • Different page templates
  • Commenting / voting using the Trello API
  • Use the board's theme to colour the site
  • A CLI to ease scraping trello for keys and ids

This repo was setup with robb-j/node-base

About

Use Trello as a CMS to create & manage a website

hub.docker.com/r/openlab/husky-cms/

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