Canvas

Canvas is a simple, powerful blog publishing platform that lets you to share your stories with the world. Its beautifully designed interface and completely customizable framework allows you to create and publish your own blog, giving you tools that make it easy and even fun to do.

Features Google Material Design, SimpleMDE for Markdown publishing with syntax highlighting by PrismJS, full-site searching by TNTSearch, native Google Analytics integration and more, all powered by Laravel!

Requirements

Before you proceed make sure your server meets the following requirements:

• Composer
• PHP >= 5.6.4
• PHP Extensions (PDO, SQLite, OpenSSL, Mbstring, Tokenizer)
• PDO compliant database (SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite)

Installation

1. There are 3 ways of downloading the application:

   • Use GitHub: simply click the Clone or download button at the top right of this page and choose Download ZIP
   • Use Git: git clone https://github.com/austintoddj/canvas.git
   • Use Packagist: composer create-project austintoddj/canvas

2. Run composer install from the command line in the project root.

3. Run npm install from the command line in the project root.

4. Run php artisan storage:link to link the storage/app/public folder to public/storage

5. Copy the contents of .env.example and create a new file called .env in the project root. Set your application variables in the new file. Be sure to keep the value of APP_ENV set to local for the duration of the install.

6. Run php artisan canvas:install and follow the on-screen prompts.

7. Run chmod -R 777 storage/ to change the permissions of the storage/ directory.

Congratulations! Your new blog is set up and ready to go. Feeling adventurous? Continue on with the advanced options below to get even more out of Canvas.

Advanced Options

1. Themes

   • Run npm install gulp from the command line in the project root.
   • Create your own theme by editing the stylesheet at resources/assets/sass/theme/styles.scss or grab an Official Canvas Theme, fresh off the palette.
   • Run gulp after any changes to resources/assets/sass/theme/styles.scss

2. Google Analytics

   • Set up a web property on Google Analytics.
   • Enter your tracking ID on the Settings page.

3. Disqus Integration

   • Generate a unique shortname from Disqus.
   • Enter your shortname on the Settings page.

4. Email Notifications

   • To enable the Forgot My Password feature on the login page, make sure you set the appropriate mail driver variables in your .env file.

Contributing

Thank you for considering contributing to Canvas! The contribution guide provides instructions on how to submit an issue, create pull requests and more. It also has details about joining the official HipChat group for those who want to be a part of Canvas' future development.

Changelog

Detailed changes for each release are documented in the release notes.

License

Canvas is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.