Canvas

Canvas is a simple, powerful blog publishing platform that lets you to share your stories with the world. Its beautifully designed interface and completely customizable framework allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do. It is inspired by Google Material Design, powered by Laravel and features SimpleMDE for Markdown writing, site searching by TNTSearch, native Google Analytics integration and more!

Requirements

Before you proceed make sure your server meets the following requirements:

• Composer
• PHP >= 5.6.4
• PHP Extensions (PDO, SQLite, OpenSSL, Mbstring, Tokenizer)
• PDO compliant database (SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite)

Installation

1. There are 3 ways of downloading the application:

   • Use GitHub: simply click the Clone or download button at the top right of this page and choose Download ZIP
   • Use Git: git clone https://github.com/austintoddj/canvas.git
   • Use Packagist: composer create-project austintoddj/canvas

2. From the command line in the project root, run composer install

3. Give the uploads/ directory write-access by the web server: chown -R www-data:www-data public/uploads/

4. Copy the contents of .env.example and create a new file called .env in the project root. Set your application variables in the new file.

5. Run php artisan canvas:install and follow the on-screen prompts.

6. To build the initial search index, run php artisan canvas:index

7. Change the permissions of the storage/ directory: chmod -R 777 storage/

8. Sign in to the application at http://YOUR_DOMAIN/admin

   • Email: admin@canvas.com
   • Password: password

Congratulations! Your new blog is set up and ready to go. Feeling adventurous? Continue on with the advanced options below to get even more out of Canvas.

Advanced Options

1. Child Themes

   • Run npm install from the project root
   • Run npm install gulp
   • Child theme files are already waiting for you at resources/assets/sass/
   • After any changes in these files, run gulp

2. Google Analytics

   • Set up a web property on Google Analytics.
   • Enter your tracking ID (GA_ID) into the .env file.
   • Enable Google Analytics in the .env file by setting GA_ENABLE to true

3. Disqus Integration

   • Generate a unique shortname from Official Documentation.
   • Enter your shortname (DISQUS_NAME) into the .env file.

Contributing

Thank you for considering contributing to Canvas! The contribution guide provides instructions on how to submit an issue, create pull requests and more. It also has details about joining the official HipChat group for those who want to be a part of Canvas' future development.

Changelog

Detailed changes for each release are documented in the release notes.

License

Canvas is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.