Shape CMS

Shape is a content management system, written in Clojure. It's target use case is bespoke websites created by developers or development agencies that value stability and ease of maintenance, while allowing the content of the site to be managed with ease by non-developers. Currently in progress, docs will appear as things get created.

Installation

Prerequisites

• Have Clojure CLI tool installed (namely clj CLI tool)
• Have Java installed

Running Shape

All you need is to execute this command in the folder where Shape's code is:

clj -X shape.core/run

By running Shape the first time, it will automatically set-up the DB. Then fire up your browser and visit localhost:3999/admin, this should direct you to the setup page where you can create your account, after which it will redirect you to the admin panel (which is currently empty).

You can change the port that Shape is running on by setting the PORT environment variable.

Database configuration

By default Shape will create a SQLite database on its own when first running it, named shape.db, and it will live in the root directory of the site. You can however overwrite this via the DB_URL environment variable, which has to be a valid JDBC URL format and point to a SQLite database.

E-mail configuration

For things that require e-mail, such as the ability to reset your password, you also need to set up additional SMTP settings. There are a number of services that provide a SMTP service, such as Mailgun and Postmark.

To set up e-mail services, you should configure the following environment variables:

• MAIL_FROM - E-mail address that the mails are sent from (example: [email protected])
• MAIL_HOST - SMTP host (example: smtp.postmarkapp.com)
• MAIL_USER - SMTP username
• MAIL_PASSWORD - SMTP password
• MAIL_PORT - SMTP port
• MAIL_TLS - Set this to true if you want to use TSL, otherwise remove it.
• MAIL_SSL - Set this to true if you want to use SSL, otherwise remove it.

The idea

Clojure is lacking a nice, composable CMS. Something that makes it easy for developers to build websites using Clojure, and non-developers to use those websites.

And so I'm building a CMS like that.

The idea is quite simple; at the heart of it all are Content Shapes, which can be your information pages, blog posts, shop products, whatever it is - you can create infinite amount of these by putting together different data types and naming them (eg text for title, image for thumbnail, number for currency, etc). This lays out the data architecture of the site and is what the end-users will be creating.

What the end-users will spend time with is Content, which are composed out of the Content Shapes you've created, allowing the user to easily manage content with different data structures from the admin panel.

Then there are Partials, these are pure-Clojure functions in your Theme that spit out HTML (via Hiccup, I figure). This can be anything you want, and it enables the use of a DSL to fetch data from the previously mentioned Content Shapes. Could be a Product View, could be a Blog Post View, whatever you want, these are the building blocks of the website.

And at last there are Pages. Pages are composed out of Partials, and they are attached to a URL. The URL could be static, like /about, or it could be dynamic like /blog/{post}. Partials will also have a way to tell what the {post} is in case of a dynamic URL, so that you could fetch the right data for your Partial.

And that's it, pretty straight-forward and this alone should enable the creation of quite many different websites, be it a blog, an online-shop or portfolio.

Roadmap to 0.1

• [x] Site setup flow
• [x] Authentication flow
• [x] Content Shapes implementation
• [ ] Content creation in admin panel - In progress
• [ ] Pages implementation
• [ ] Default theme creation