Astrid the Editor - A Side Project Turned Product
January 30, 2017I’m a big fan of Hugo the static site generator. I use it for this site and I’ve used it for a few smaller client projects. Hugo is flexible and allows for a great deal of customisation, the problem I have is that it is just a pain to manage large amount of content. If for example I would like to add something to the Front Matter for all content I would need to go through every single file or write a script that adds or remove the key and value from the Front Matter. To solve this problem and make Hugo even more enjoyable I’ve created Astrid. Astrid is an editor specifically created to manage, create and publish Hugo based content. Astrid is named after the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren
It is all in the early stages right now. I’ve made a simple prototype using Electron performing certain tasks calling Hugo commands like getting Hugo version and creating new content. I’ve tried a few different approaches and at first I thought I would use Vue but I couldn’t figure out a good structure so I turned to Ember to get a structure to work with that I’m familiar with. Fortunately there is a project created by Felix Rieseberg called Ember Electron which integrates Ember and more important the Ember-Cli with Electron.
I’ve now started to build the actual editor now using what I’ve learned from the prototype by creating a Ember Electron project with simple navigation between dashboard and editor loading data and information based on the static dummy content I’ve created. To kickstart the project and keep focus on key features I’ve sketched out a few ideas on my iPad Pro using Pro Create and then finalising at least a beta design to get things started. This is what I’ve made so far.
The dashboard shows work in progress with easy access to media management, two things I find important in publishing tools.
After a lot of thought I went with split view for the editor but it will be possible to edit and produce content in full screen or single column.
The plan is to build the site for Astrid using only Astrid from start to finish. I’ll keep you posted when the “Hello Astrid” page is up and running on astrideditor.com.