Blogging Platform

The gist: Allow users to author long form content in Markdown and render the posts as web pages.

Ah, is there anything more generic than a blogging platform? Well, I guess a todo list. But there's something about blogging and blogging tools that I always go back to and find comforting. It must be something about the joy of publishing something online with relative ease.

This project is great for those learning a language and/or a framework and who would be interested in maintaining their own blog. The data model is often pretty simple for getting started, and you can always expand it and add functionality as you need it.

I'd focus just on text to start. Text can get you a long way. Then explore things like uploading and hosting images, that sort of thing.

If I were to build this project, I'd call it Blogbud or something like that. Are you sick of the *bud names throughout Projectbook? Well, I'm not yet. Sorry.

Mock-Ups

Here's what a simple interface for managing posts and then viewing a post could look like:

Specs

The following features would be nice to have for the basics:

Authentication for users (a.k.a. someone signs up)
Blog creation
Post creation for a blog
Post editing
Post deleting
Viewing a post as a reader

Data Model

Here's a simple outline of what the data model could be like:

Posts
- blog_id — the blog it belongs to
- created_at
- published_at
- updated_at
- title
- slug
- body
- authors/users association
Blogs
- name
- description
- authors/users association
Users
- email
- encrypted_password
- name
- photo

Concepts

Authentication
Admin for authoring and managing posts
Rendering Markdown as HTML
Access control/permissions/authorization

Extra Credit

Allow posts to created as drafts but not yet published
Schedule posts to be published in the future
Generate an RSS and/or Atom feed for the posts
Support image and other file uploads in the post body
Support attachments to the post object
- Images for rich sharing data
- Audio files (with a special RSS feed) and you've got a podcast!
Allow posts to be tagged for readers to browse posts by tag
Add an easy mechanism to allow readers to heart a post to show they enjoyed it
- Unique it by IP or something along those lines
Support multiple blogs for a given user
Image uploads
Caching the pages or even generating a static site
Search

References

Wordpress
Ghost