"The poor man's forestry.io' - Me, 2022.
So, imagine you have created a nice Hugo or Jekyll static website for some personal project and hosted it on Github. Everything is fine and dandy until one of your non-tech friends wants to edit one small thing or maybe add a blog post.
Oh no! you think: either you'll have to teach him to do it by himself (which, even thought seems obvious and easy, a lot of people have difficulty with), or you'll have to use some service like forestry.io (which, while very good, sometimes is an overkill or can be an unexpected up in your budget of 0$).
Well, friend, I do have the solution for you. It's this static, 100% frontend, free and compact and simple editor called Brigita (briGITa, get it? yes, I achieved comedy). Brigita fills the gap of trying to be very non-tech friendly, while still being flexible enough to help people achieve their means.
The best part is that the entire system is less than 600 lines of code in a single index.js¹ coded in React using MaterialUI and hosted on Github pages. This means that every person can fork/clone and make their own functioning version.
- Create your github repository with your Hugo website.
- Configure a workflow to regenerate the build every change in the repository
- Create a Personal Access Token
- Connect to Brigita and start editing
- Push every time you change a file
- Watch the website update!
So, meanwhile, creating the website and the webflow is still done manually. In future versions, I'd probably try to integrate both in Brigita, check the to-do and updates for that.
Since this is an static website hosted on github, every operation is done user-side. The github API OAuth authentication requires server, so I decided to skip that and use directly a Personal Access Token.
Basically, the program fetches the user repositories, and fetch every file/directory as the user clicks them (inefficient for the user, I know, but it's how the API works².
Then, when the user changes or creates a new file, the program simply makes a push in the repository. Yes, Brigita is a glorified git pull-push, but your non-tech friend doesn't know that.
- V 0.1.0: (25/10/2022)
- Revived the old idea and started prototyping. Basically we just have the visuals, and the functioning but it still doesn't push to the repo.
- Example button should show user what the main point is.
(No Questions so far!)
¹ (I know the pitfalls of this practice, but I like to design these functional react websites in the more "direct" way possible, so whenever editing or taking a piece apart, it works on its own. Brigita is simple/direct enough this still makes sense.)
² The github API repo tree could be used, but in some cases it can fetch an infinitude of useless files, which is why they recommend just fetching content per content.
Criticism and new ideas are more than welcome.