Paperbits - a new content builder that is made open source, server-less and extremely powerful.
These days we see many products (to name a few: Wordpress, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Unbounce, Remote, etc.) that include rich content authoring as one of their core features. Usually, their functionality incorporates simple drag & drop interface, a library of design blocks and a number of themes. Teams behind those products are all trying to do their best to enable non-professional users to create high-quality content with ease.
Though, implementing simple, intuitive tools that every person can use efficiently is a very challenging task that requires considerable UX design and programming resource. So, before crafting another page builder or email template editor, just think about what will you need. It at least required the following:
rich text editor;
media library;
responsive grid system (and an editor for it);
form-factor controls (to switch between for desktop, tablet, and mobile);
touch screen support;
user input validation;
drag & drop support;
touch screen support;
...and many other thing.
Here at Paperbits, we're trying to take away this burden and give teams (especially startups), working on similar projects, a good starting point - the code that is open-sourced and well supported. So that, instead of inventing the wheel once again, they could concentrate on their big idea. Therefore, from the beginning, we paid a big deal of attention to integration story. The decision was made to build our content authoring tools as a set of loosely-coupled components that make up a static (pure JS/HTML/CSS) web application with the API-first principle in mind so that the only integration point you need to care about is content management API. Moreover, in the age of "server-less" web, you may not need to even think about this: thus, using our client for Firebase or Github, you don't need to build any backend at all!
Same loosely-coupling approach Paperbits follows for all the data that it outputs, which is entirely abstracted from any platform, framework or theme used to publish it (please read "Key concepts" to learn more).
That gives us insane lots of capabilities: For example, it is now possible to build a universal publishing platform that would take an article, written once, and push it into all your favorite social media (Medium, Facebook, Linked-In, Github Wiki, etc.) by one click. Not to mention how easy it is to switch themes on one's website without the fear of breaking the content.
At the same time, paperbits data is well-structured which makes it easy to analyze and process, attach metadata, etc. A good usage example would be a "broken link tracking" feature that won't let you delete a page, blog post or media referenced by other pages. Similarly, any change in resource permalink URL will be reflected everywhere on the website.
The story of Paperbits doesn't end here. To learn more about other great features and capabilities, please refer to these resources:
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