Feels strange that it's been so long, but we're at it again, and loving TKLDEV.

Our first challenge with TKLDEV has been trying to produce a fully turn key appliance for the new Ghost blogging platform.

Ghost is still under development, but its source is public on github. It's an ambitious project: a professional blogging platform (with journalists in mind) that produces well-formatted posts through a sole reliance on Markdown.

We were unsure which Turnkey appliance to use as our base: MySQL, NodeJS, LAMP...There are good arguments for all of them. But ultimately, we went with core - we had frustration working with Node and understanding it; We were/are new to Nodejs. So, this patch compiles node from source, installs and configure nginx, and relies on SQLite; inithooks prepare the application on first boot by asking for email, asking for and hashing password, and setting the URL in Ghost's config.js.

Ghost: http://ghost.org

Ghost on Github: http://github.com/tryghost

Ghost for TKLDEV: https://github.com/ghoulmann/tkl-ghost

Ghost is configured to install at /opt/ghost; I remember this being a variable so it's almost easy to change in the code. Web Dev students contributed images (Davida, James, Bryan); advanced Information Systems Management students contributed code (Paul, Lucas, Alex, Joseph, TJ); first year ISM students also contributed (Micah, Sean, Matthew, Kelvin, Jonathan).

There's one outstanding point to be corrected: asking for the URL at firstboot seems awkward; it seems better to set the URL automatically on everyboot based on $ipaddr.

What do you think? All feedback is significantly appreciated. Looking forward to working on more.

Forum: 

Should add this: we've configured the appliance to setup and launch ghost in development mode. If --production mode would be wiser, it should be no problem for us to revise the patch.

Jeremy Davis's picture

I know nothing about Ghost and probably don't have any immediate use for it, but I love to see and hear what you and your students get up to!

As for your question re asking for URL, as you know, I'm no real expert on these things but I think it depends on what the software does with the URL (i.e. how it uses that info). From my experience with other software I personally I think that asking the end user for a domain name is totally legitimate and I have even seen some software redirect from a URL to an IP (so the IP shows in the address bar) when internal links are used (if it was set with an IP rather than a domain name). Obviously that's not a real biggy, but is not ideal IMO.

Beyond that I think it's a person choice. You do what you think best and the TKL guys will adjust as they see fit (assuming they pick it up as an official appliance).

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