GUTENBERG - A blogging and newspaper solution

README auf Deutsch hier verfügbar! :)

Gutenberg is an Express.js project aiming to provide a simple yet comprehensive solution for managing blogs and small news sites, aimed for both developers and producers (authors / orgs) alike.

Purpose

Web applications and web sites whose main method of content delivery is through a large number of pages require a scalable method of delivery with a responsive and intuitive layout for both producers and consumers. This project aims to serve as a template for building apps while keeping code low, aside from customization choices such as styling or frontend features.

Installation & Environment

Packages

The server-side code is written in Javascript using Node, and requires the following npm packages:

• Bootstrap for responsive and accessible styling
• Express for middleware
• ejs for templating
• mongodb for interacting with a mongodb database
• morgan for logging
• redis for cacheing commonly-used elements across pages
• Jest and Selenium (see Tests)

MongoDB is used to serve article / blog text. Media retrieval is achieved through local storage and a custom store and search implementation, which is accessible via the admin view.

Runtime Environment

This app is developed with Node.js v21.5.0. All necessary packages are included in package.json.

Installation

• Clone this repository

git clone

• Set up the environment by installing the required dependencies included in the package.json file using

npm install

Tests

This project will include both Jest for unit tests and Selenium for end-to-end testing. These packages are included under devDependencies in package.json. Currently, only a basic database unit test has been written.

I've also added Artillery as a dependency for load testing, with a spike test configured in artillery-config.yaml. In the application's current iteration, it does not appear to handle load testing well.

Development Roadmap

Diagram coming soon.

Implemented Features

• Article generation via templates and text stored in the database
• Simple HTTP request logs

Developing Features

• Final Homepage layout
• Final article layout
• Live news feed logic and layout
• Basic admin interface for post CRUD operations.
• Media retrieval without database querying
• Redis caching

Planned Features

• In-built post analytics

Potentially:

• LaTeX integration (will likely need to update the data query logic to handle this)
• Colour and font customization

Additional Features (i.e. security features)

Coming soon.

Documentation

As this project is aimed both for other developers to build on and for writers or small organizations to use as a template for news sites and blogs, this documentation entails a description of the source code, how to customize the content and layout, and creating new content as an admin.