To all #ruby and #rubyonrails folks: I recently forked ComfrotableMexicanSofa CMS and fully moved it to #turbo and all other goodies to be able to use it for my personal portfolio website. I'm planning a lot of features and improvements (including ActivityPub support) so stay tuned for more!
I'm gonna name it Comfy CMS and you can follow it here: https://github.com/mbajur/comfy
Let me know if you have any questions or ideas!
@tvdeyen I've been using Alchemy for last couple of days to try to port my portfolio from comfy and...I have to tell I'm 100% sold. This thing is brilliant. Is there anything you could use help with? We can chat on some more private channel if you prefer that.
Thank you for all your work, it's really mind blowing what you've managed to achieve.
@mbajur my problem is that the #Rails ecosystem already has a lot of simple #CMS.
#AlchemyCMS has features that my customers know from other professional CMS and therefore expect them to be included as well.
However, a #hotwire revamp for #alchemy would be pretty cool as well as the backend is functional but #hotwirejs would clearly be a modern addition.
Or a migration to #ActiveStorage from #dragonfly.
@tvdeyen It's very tough to pinpoint as i don't have it installed anywhere to click through but if you're interested in that, i can set it up ;)
I'm pretty sure that, just like @alexanderadam said, "backend looks dated, not terrible but not catchy either" - exactly that. That's a bigger writeup so i have to split that into separate toots. These are not ALL my points but major ones (and forgive if I'm spreading misinformation, it was a long time since i last used it):
@tvdeyen 1. From what i recall, website was a bit hard to work with but i can see you moved to this classic theme/tool for app documentation and i love that move.
Even though it's a bit generic, it makes looking at docs a pleasure so thanks for that. Super happy to see that!
@mbajur @tvdeyen Haha. Yeah. Luckily Alchemy uses custom properties to style the admin. The colors are easy to change.
I am actually currently working on a dark mode. So, please check it out and help adjusting the colors.
https://github.com/AlchemyCMS/alchemy_cms/pull/3251
/cc @alexanderadam
@alexanderadam @tvdeyen @mbajur Yes. I can see that people want to widen up the dense UI alchemy has. It is on purpose though. I carefully try to not be in the way of the actual website you are building and want to provide as much as information possible even on small screens.
Maybe we could provide a density toggle? 馃
@tvdeyen @alexanderadam I believe there is a possibility to make the interface feel less dense without actually taking more space.
I would say https://polarisviewcomponents.org/ is a good example of a "tiny" UI without this dense feeling (based on shopify design system)
@tvdeyen 3. This one is a bit controversial - you're using a custom CSS instead of a well known framework which is completely understandable but here is a catch - when one wants to extend the core, he needs to write his own custom CSS as well or at least decipher the classes you're currently using for the core.
That was also pushing me off because if i were about to add some module to the backend or create a plugin, styling it from scratch would be involved.
@mbajur @tvdeyen Alchemy has its own Admin Component UI system. You can use its building blocks to quickly built CRUD interfaces. So, if you do not plan to do any crazy with it, you shouldn't need to touch any CSS.
Most of the time you simply inherit from the Admin Resources controller and are good to go.
@tvdeyen 4. Backend JS extendability? I'm not sure how it's done right now in alchemy but when i forked comfy, i moved everything to importmaps which made it possible to register new JS modules from engines (or parent apps) - so the backend JS layer became easily extendable.
How is that part planned to be handled? I would also love to see stimulus being used with it's controllers and all the goodies
@mbajur @tvdeyen The problem with Stimulus is that it is soon-to-be-legacy tech. It won't survive long. The web browser will continue to work with vanilla JS. Stimulus won't (as all other JS frameworks). So, we will stay with the amazing tools the browser provides us today.
Give custom-elements a try. You would be amazed how great they are.
@tvdeyen @alexanderadam Actually, you know what...I decided there is much more potential value in me trying to contribute to Alchemy rather than reviving comfy from the dead therefore i will try to port my comfy website to it and see how it goes this time.
Is the ActiveStorage support anywhere close?
@mbajur @tvdeyen @alexanderadam Unfortunately no. There is only a work in progress PR, that recently have been closed automatically. I re-opened it, so folks can have a look what is needed (there is a lot, because Alchemy has very sophisticated image manipulation built in)
https://github.com/AlchemyCMS/alchemy_cms/pull/2968
Happy to get some help with this. And even if this is guidance and ideas that I am happy to discuss.
What is this pull request for? Reworks Use Active Storage for Picture and File attachments #2544 Needs fix PictureEditor defaultCropSize #2987 Use ActiveStorage instead of Dragonfly for picture a...
@mbajur @tvdeyen Not sure. Need to go through that PR once again to be able to answer that.
Most importantly we need a way to migrate existing sites. Since we have installations with hundreds of thousands of images, we probably want something that provides an adapter, so they can still use Dragonfly and migrate their site bit by bit.
@mbajur @tvdeyen @alexanderadam https://demo.alchemy-cms.com/ is a fully functional demo that you can uee to click around.
The github repo is also ipen source and can be used as a template repo.
Let me know if you need any help with setting it up locally.
@alexanderadam @mbajur Regarding migrating from Dragonfly. That is a number one priority right now. The tricky part is migrations for existing sites. We plan on adding a active storage adapter in 8.0, provide a migration path and remove it in 9.0.
Any help is very much appreciated
mbajur
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