node-express-workshop-complete

This is the reference implementation for the node-express-workshop I am working on.

The workshop is still being written, but I'd love feedback on the this project!

The outcome is a simple blog website using:

• Node.js v7.6+
• Express for the web server
• EJS for templates
• Bootstrap for styling
• LevelDB to store content

The website includes:

• A home page that displays all blog posts
• A view that displays the full content of a post
• A create post form that lets you add a new post to the database
• Simple 404 (not found) and error handlers

Setup

First, make sure you have Node.js v7.6 or higher installed. Then clone or fork this repository.

Then install the dependencies by running:

npm install

To start the website, run:

node server

Then visit localhost:3000 to view the blog.

If you want to reset the content database, you can do that by running:

node server --reset

Caveats

There are a few things you'd want to do in a production app that I haven't included, because the point of this project is to demonstrate the core concepts involved in setting up a database-driven blog / cms with node.js as simply as possible.

Specifically, it doesn't handle:

• Performance (thousands of posts would cause problems)
  • Posts on the homepage should be paginated
  • Markdown is converted to HTML in real time, in a production app you'd cache the output in the database
• Sessions or security - anyone can add a post
• Database errors
• SEO - it doesn't generate friendly URLs, meta tags or a sitemap

Next Steps

There are a number of "good next steps" you could take from here. They include:

• Customise the style of the blog
• Add a favicon (hint: there's an express package for that!)
• Generate friendly IDs for posts, instead of using the current time (there's a package for that too)
• Give posts an image upload field
• Add a Sitemap handler
• Switch from markdown to a rich HTML editor, e.g. CKEditor, TinyMCE or Trix
• Use a different database
• Add session management to protect creating posts

If you're interested in a proper CMS for building Node.js websites, check out KeystoneJS

License

MIT License. Copyright (c) 2017 Jed Watson.