Future of Flowershow - Rufus and Ola - 2023-04-11

Present: Rufus, Ola

🔴 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jQYs-sC8OSKPAikWeMucYef8r0_3DsDP/view

Intention: discuss Vision for Flowershow going forward

Agenda

• Preliminaries
  • Read Rufus braindump https://github.com/flowershow/flowershow/discussions/474
  • Re-read our notes on publishing https://flowershow.app/notes/design-cloud-publishing
• Reflections on Flowershow so far
• Potential Roadmap7u7uhq65x6t
• AOB: MarkdownDB
  • MarkdownDB - getting it a website …
  • A use case https://github.com/datopian/portals-monorepo/discussions/331
  • MarkdownDB is 2 patterns
    • A way of using Markdown files for a kind-of DB (i.e. a ContentBase made of Markdown files)
    • A database of files on disk (made of markdown)
    • (And a third is: the tooling and library for this stuff)

Insights from our experience with Flowershow over the last months

• We have built 5 sites using Flowershow ourselves
• We have 250 ⭐ and quite a few users?
• On the sites we have built ourselves what have we found?
  • We wanted more a framework
    • Flowershow is useful as a bootstrap …
    • But also kind of annoying in other ways …
    • Has got better with v1 (monorepo)
    • But that was where we became a framework
  • At other end of spectrum: users (and our own use cases) where we want something ultra-simple that "just works" i.e. i don't have to do stuff myself (so less framework-y)

Insights 1: build a framework not a template

A framework is:

• Useful library
• Might have bootstrap template and/or scaffolding … but you are on your own after that
• Some patterns
• Docs ❗
• NB: he more you provide the more you have to maintain

Specifically, Flowershow framework should be:

• Content Layer aka MarkdownDB
• Some helpful components in "headless" style
  • headless style = using tailwind with named color and heading etc
• Markdown processing pipeline including combination of curate and/or bespoke plugins
• Generally most useful thing is actually docs and patterns

Insight 2: if you go the product route, go cloud …

• just want it to work
• look good
• (future: could have a plugin ecosystem)

This is simple and useful.

Flowershow Cloud

Design brainstorm

• If you could get away with live rendering SSR … i would do it
  • Because you don't have to redeploy everyones's site on changes
  • You can do live updates (don't have to wait for 3m build to see your changes live)
    • You could even do live previewing by pushing to cloud and rendering from that in real-time
• You have a defined set of components you can use
• None of this complexity of using MDX …
  • At least not importing other files etc
  • Please make it work with ordinary html …
  • …
• What do you need for SSR? you need a render pipeline that is not disk dependent
• we need to push to the cloud …

MVP cloud.flowershow.app

User experience

• signup / signin
• I have my folder on disk:

  index.md
  cats.md
  cat.jpg # note need to render this direct
  

• i do flowershow publish
• and i have a site mysite-random.cloud.flowershow.app
• Bonus: obsidian plugin

Architecture

How does it work:

• sync to R2 somehow
• and then i render …
• more sophisticated stuff
  • i'm going to prep the sqlite database (or refresh it)
  • i'm going to do image processing etc

3 parts of the app: dashboard, render and sync

• cloud dashboard
  • signup
  • billing etc
  • projects
• render system
• sync system
  • syncer to our storage
  • obsidian plugin

Next steps

• Convert core to markdowndb and new next-mdx-remote render pipeline
• Move the Flowershow repo to Datopian

Plan of work

• SSR version of Flowershow
• Library to load from r2
  • Work out how we do static assets e.g. do we rewrite or proxy or …
• Test: Create an R2 folder or even github repo
• Read subdomain incoming, look up project in project db, look up content from relevant r2 bucket
• Profit

Uploader

• Direct to R2 or through our gateway
• How does permission work …
  • Need to hand out tokens to upload each file

Admin

• Create a new "private" repo for flowershow-cloud on datopian

Notes

Questions

• How does tailwind stuff work e.g. if i use custom tailwind in my markdown how does that get picked up
  • Not supported?
  • Run tailwind build out of band to generate tailwind css …
  • Or see https://shubhamverma.me/blog/server-side-rendering-of-tailwind-css-styles-in-next-js - though may not cover where stuff in markdown …