Announcing Chisel - an open source API First CMS

Welcome to Chisel - our API-first CMS built on top of Parse Server, now in BETA.

It was back in October 2015 when I first wrote about how I saw the future workflow of building content-driven static sites. Beach offered nearly all the pieces of that particular puzzle. Except the CMS part, where we have been using Contentful, Prismic and Cockpit among others.

When Parse.com shut down and having jumped into Parse Server, the open source alternative, along with Parse Dashboard, it clicked that this would make for a great stack for a headless CMS.

At one end of the spectrum, it's fully open and flexible - I can tweak, change, extend and customise every aspect of the backend, a node.js / express.js application with mongoDB. It provides an API out of the box for my resources, and a plentiful number of client libraries and SDKs. 

The Parse Dashboard, which provides a web interface to the core data and settings makes working with Parse server a breeze.

I can run Parse Server and Parse Dashboard locally, I can host it easily myself using AWS, Digital Ocean etc. or use one of a number of Parse Server hosting specialists.

But, Parse Server alone did not provide me with a content management solution, it was a backend solution.

So, late in 2016 I started to build out a proof of concept CMS app, with the team here at Beach and by late 2016 we had some progress. But a number of other priorities has meant that Chisel development has had a bit of a stop-start progress during 2017. 

It's actually been working well for a while and we've been using it internally, but not had chance to make a fuss about it. But I'm not one for leaving work in progress, so I'm very happy formally announce Chisel by way of a shiny new product site - https://chiselcms.com.

Currently, we're leading off with the self-help, self-host or run locally options, which is more suited to the developer community (though it's really quite easy to get started if you're not an experienced javascript coder) . You can run Chisel from the open source Github repositories. Even more straightforward, you can run it from npm. You can run it locally or you can host it on your servers or a managed service provider. There's loads of options, because developers like options - there's no blackboxes here.

However, that's not the end of the road by any stretch of the imagination.

We've already made an initial integration into our static site generator app, Hammer. This way, you can build content managed static sites with ease.

We've already built support for managed Parse Server and Chisel Hosting via Forge, setting up everything with a couple of clicks, we'll be releasing this soon.

There's so much to talk about with Chisel, it truly is a powerful, flexible and open solution to creating and managing your content across different platforms and devices. We're just getting started.

If you're interested in the development history of Chisel, take a look at this Topic on our community site, and of course, join the discussion.

If you'd like to setup Chisel with Parse Server, hosted on a free heroku server, this is a helpful step-by-step guide.

And finally, did I mention Chisel, just like Parse Server, is open-source. We're chipping away at the roadmap, but if there's something you'd like to see, something urgent to improve or something we've missed, then let us know on the community site and better yet, I'm happy to review your pull requests.

Free SSL for all Forge Sites

Not a week has gone by without this feature request being made, as SSL has become a mainstream requirement for professional websites and applications these days - well I'm glad to announce that it's here!

I've made SSL available to all sites on the Forge platform, regardless of whether it's on a Forge subdomain or a custom domain and regardless of whether you're a paying customer or a free plan user.

Setup SSL

Activating SSL is super simple, just follow these basic steps.

1. Login or Sign Up to Forge.

2. Go to one of your sites and click the Settings tab in the main navigation.

3. Scroll down the Settings page until you see the SSL section.

4. Click the checkbox to activate the SSL.

5. Hit Save.

And that is all, I told you. Simple. But wait, there's a little more to it... let's continue.

Commissioning SSL

Our SSL certificates are provided by Let's Encrypt. There are some constraints to the service that we have to manage, mainly around the number of certificates that they can issue per week. Here's how we're handling it during the initial roll out...

1. Getforge.io subdomains

Once we receive your request you are added to a queue that will be processed nightly every 24 hours. So activate today, tomorrow you should be ready to go. If you have a paid Forge subscription, however, we will expedite this and process your request on an hourly schedule. Do use this as an excuse to finally upgrade to a paid account if you haven't already :)

2. Custom domains

These will be processed in a job that runs every hour, so often your certificates will be issued and installed within a few minutes, but could be up to 60. Since custom domains are only available to those with at least one of our paid subscriptions, this is the only way we're handling custom domains right now.

Once your certificate is issued, we'll do the boring work of installing for you. You'll receive an email from us when you certificate is successfully setup.

When you've received that, you're ready to use https... 

Prepare Your Site for SSL

1. Redeploy your Site - Once you've received your certificate, the very minimum you'll need to do, is redeploy your site. This is because the Forge Deployment process will automatically manage your asset paths from the CDN to be served over https. This will avoid mixed content issues in the browser that would prevent your assets - like fonts and images - from loading.

2. Edit Linked Files - Any files that you're not hosting, but pulling from outside your project, like using Google Web Fonts, or including a javascript framework from another CDN, will need to be served over https. Find any non secure links and edit them, then redeploy.

Use the Force, Luke...

I'll leave it up to your good judgement if, once you're all setup, you'd like to force all requests to your site to be redirected through https or whether you're happy to accept both types. If you do prefer to force it, and I'd recommend you do, then simply switch on the option in the Site Settings. If activated, Forge will handle the rest for you.

Hammer for Mac - 6.9.0 is here

Welcome to the latest and greatest version of Hammer.

Hammer 6.9.0 has been out for pre-release testing for a little while now, since I announced it on our community site, The Guild. 

Since it has appeared stable-enough and because it brings the core Hammer app forward in a big way, I've decided to release it publicly today.

How To Get It

If you've already got Hammer installed and have enabled auto-updates, next time you open the app, it'll recognise that a new version is available and will prompt you to update it.

If you've got Hammer open and don't want to close it, head up to "Hammer" > "Check for Updates" or ⌘U. Hammer will prompt you from there.

If you're new to Hammer or still running the old App Store version, head to the Hammer Website and download from there.

What's In This Version

This new release involves both an update to the MacOS app and the core Hammer compiler version that ships with Hammer.

Preferences

• New "General" Preferences pane, accessed via shortcut ⌘, or "Hammer > Preferences..." menu
• Auto-build on file save disable in Preferences > General tab - useful when making lots of small changes and don't need the app to rebuild on each file save.
• Add Forge API Key to preferences - access your Forge

Hammer Site Advanced Settings

• Generate Hammer.json file via Hammer user interface - one click configuration file creation.
• Advanced site options/settings via GUI - no need to create files and edit JSON (though you still can...). Current options available are:
  • Sourcemaps
  • Autoprefixer with Browser options

Forge Publishing

• Forge deployment settings - after adding your Forge API Key in preferences, Hammer will list your Forge sites. Simply enable Forge deployments to publish to your selected Forge site (instead of default Hammr.co) service. This gives you both Staging and Production publishing options directly from within Hammer, something I've been wanting to add for ages!

• Enable 1-click Forge Deployment - it couldn't be any simpler to publish your Hammer site to the simplest, fastest production hosting platform around!

None of these features would be possible without a significant update to the Hammer Compiler that ships bundled into the Hammer app.

Hammer now ships with 5.4.7

What's new in this version of the Hammer Compiler?

Glad you asked...

I've been banging on about building static CMS driven sites using Hammer, Forge, Anvil and a headless CMS, such as Contentful.

We've integrated Contentful into Hammer, to make it very easy to start building content driven static sites and now this feature ships as standard, so you don't need to do the auto-update dance to play with it.

We've also integrated Cockpit, a free & open source alternative to Contentful.

Checkout our posts and discussion topics on how to get started building your next site using this exciting, fun and productive workflow.

In addition, here's the full Changelog for the various compiler updates that are included in this release.

5.4.7.1

• Allow to order cockpit collection using helper articles.order('Title', 'desc')

5.4.7

• Finished cockpit support, added page generator. It works by the same way as contentful, example config (hammer.json) may look as:

5.4.6.10

• Added base cockpit support. Example config (hammer.json):

5.4.6.08

• Added cache for contentful, to enable offline mode. Enable it by adding key "cache" into "contentful" section. For example:

5.4.6.05

• Fix conflict with html includes inside md files

5.4.6

• Allow to re-define variables.
• Fix using buildDir parameter.
• Allow to use ~ in buildDir path

5.4.5

• Allow to use hammer tags as plain text, should be used as <!-- @@include _head --> or <!-- $$value -->

• Allow to change location if build folder. Parameter should be set in hammer.json and looks like:

5.4.5

• Added jsx support
• Added react helpers

5.4.4

• Added 'SmartExeption', show meaningful error if Contentful content type or space was not found
• Added errors for missing fields, variables, iterating over not array

5.4.3

• Stack too deep fixed. Limited level of parsing assotiations.
• Allow to use rails-like helpers instead of hammer tags. = path 'mac.png' instead of <!-- @path mac.png-->
• Show pages generated by contentful in report.
• Fixed issue, when autoprefixer is enabled, sass errors are not shown.

5.4.2

• Fix including '.slim' and '.scss' files into build folder
• Enable <!-- @path --> tag for auto-generated pages

5.4.1

• Added contentful pages generator which allows generate multiple pages from single template.
• Extended hammer.json config, example config for pages generator may look like:

5.4.0

• 5.3.x reserved for rails version
• Use real numbers of processors during parallel processing
• Added base contentfull helper (supports slim only)

Anvil - 1.1.6 Released

Yesterday we released a minor update to Anvil (1.1.6). This update reflected some of the work we've been doing to decide upon a more unified UI design approach to all of our products moving forward and was very much a revert closer to the older style.

It also contains a few small but important bug fixes.

You should have the latest version of Anvil automatically, the next time you open the app.

Was that the shortest blog update yet? Possibly. I've earned myself a chocolate muffin.