Ashish’s Blog

The Plan for Scullery v1.0

I have been working on a new server-side application. And true to form, the first production version will contain a blog publishing platform. But I have grander plans for the software…

I currently use Ghost to power my various blogs. I am extremely happy with Ghost as a platform, and consider their text-editor to be the best in the business. But I have been hitting barriers when customising the site design. Some are inherent to the platform, such as custom attributes on a post, or a custom per-post design. Others issues are brought on by my choice of setup, to have similarly designed but differently hosted blogs, all linked together. All in all, I want another tool, and building one myself seemed like the easiest solution. I’ve had this Ruby on Rails application purring away on a VPS for a while, and adding publishing tools to make it more useful has been a great idea.

For version one, I’ve got this list of goals in my project management tool, Shortcut, which I can share:

  1. Users should be able to self-serve management of their accounts. They should be able to reset their passwords, verify their emails, request all information, and permanently delete their account.

  2. Users should be able to aquire application-wide roles, with superusers able to bypass specific restrictions. Superusers should also have access to the admin section of the website.

  3. Users should be able to create and manage their websites. They should be able to upload a favicon, and replace the website title with their uploaded logo.

  4. A website should be able to have blog posts and pages. The user has access to a text-only editor, with no additional features. A blog post/page must have a unique slug, and can be marked as draft and unpublished anytime. A blog post/page can have a title, and some content. Images need to be added as links via Markdown. The website needs to have an RSS feed. Users should be able to preview pages and blog posts before publishing.

  5. There is only 1 theme at time of launch. Additional prebuilt themes to be added in a point release. Custom themes reserved for v2.0.

  6. There is no support for custom domains at launch. This feature can only be used by superusers. Reserved for v2.0.

  7. Users have access to a files section, where they can upload images, and get a URL for that image. Support for additional file types to come in a point release.

  8. There is no admin management section at launch. The only admin section available is the Sidekiq web UI.

Final release date TBD.