Chimpdoc

A super-simple publication system built around documents and files.

You know what the worst bit about blogging is? The damn web-based software. With Chimpdoc, you use files and a text editor. Simples.

This is hardly groundbreaking software, but the idea is that you can just store some assets somewhere and chimpdoc will grab them and cache them under the hood, not caring about where they're stored. Articles in Dropbox, photos in Flickr, comments on twitter: just write an adapter and expose the resource.

Setup

At the moment, there are two filesystem adapters: local files and dropbox.

Local files

Setting up local files is dead easy:

Chimpdoc.config do |c|
  c.storage(:filesystem) do |s|
    s.directory = File.join("/path/to/articles")
  end
end
blog = Chimpdoc::Blog.new

This will look in /path/to/articles for any markdown files and offer them up through blog.feed.

Dropbox

You'll need a dropbox account and a dropbox developer account. Grab the developer API key and secret, and run rake setup:dropbox in the chimpdoc project directory. Follow the instructions, and you'll end up with a config block:

Chimpdoc.config do |c|
  c.storage(:dropbox) do |s|
    s.app = {
      :key => DROPBOX_DEV_KEY,
      :secret => DROPBOX_DEV_SECRET
    }
    s.token = {
      :key => DROPBOX_CLIENT_KEY,
      :secret => DROPBOX_CLIENT_SECRET
    }
  end
end
blog = Chimpdoc::Blog.new

Caching

chimpdoc will store articles in a cache once they've been read from the filesystem. You can configure the cache (or forget about it if your filestore is fast enough):

Chimpdoc.config { |c| c.cache = Rails.cache }

Example

I use this to allow me to update Relative Sanity by editing files in dropbox. There's a simple example site (not quite the same) living under the tarzan project. Hopefully that should help get you started.

Contributing

This works for me, so there's not a lot of incentive for me to add things, but I know some people will find it useful. If you do, or if there's something you want to add (like tests!), please do. Same goes for tarzan.

Happy Hacking!