Idea: Empress Editor UI

[elwayman02]

I think it would really drive adoption of Empress if there was an easy way to edit and manage publishing without having to be familiar with GitHub and Markdown. An admin page for Empress Blogs would be perfect for non-technical people to feel comfortable publishing, and it could be implemented without requiring a backend, I think.

• Authenticate user through GitHub to ensure their account has access to the repository
• Pull existing posts from GitHub API to show to user
• Allow user to edit posts or create new ones, save posts by creating PRs (and automerging or presenting status in UI?)

Since Empress is entirely driven by the creation of files for its four content types (authors, pages, posts, tags), the entire thing could be driven by the GitHub API. This way, users would not have to even understand how GitHub works. They could hit the Netlify deploy button to get a new project, then our documentation could direct them to the URL for the admin dashboard, where they would authenticate with GitHub and be able to fully manage the Empress site.

I really believe this would be a gamechanger for Empress to be able to compare itself to more popular platforms that are entirely designed for non-technical users.

[rtablada]

Some prior art to go on would be the Netlify CMS

My thought is a simultaneous preview could be achieved with a simple timer and pushing content to localstorage (which was what I have used for previous "live previews" across different tabs/windows.

[elwayman02]

Oops, didn't mean to close it!

Also, leaving this here as a reference: https://github.com/elwayman02/ember-data-github

ember-data-github needs a little TLC in terms of an Ember blueprint upgrade and migration to Octane, but in theory it could provide what we need in terms of auth and interacting with the GitHub API. I'm not tied to it despite being the "owner" of that project, though.