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Porting Website to KeystoneJS

Posted in KeystoneJS, JavaScript

One of my first roles at Skagit Publishing as a website designer was to find them a new Content Management System (CMS). As I have an affinitiy for JavaScript over PHP, I began focusing on JavaScript based CMS. With Node and the Express.js library only being a few years old, there aren't many well established CMSs out there. KeystoneJS seemed to be the most developed and best supported JavaScript-based CMS I could find.

 

I've begun learning the ins and outs of KeystoneJS as well as building and customizing the CMS for one of Skagit Publishing's clients. I decided I should drink my own koolaid, so I've ported ChrisTroutner.com over to KeystoneJS too. I had some trouble getting the Angular.js library to run correctly. In all honesty, I haven't been terribly impressed with Angular in my own personal experience using it. At first, I used it extensively on ChrisTroutner.com, but there was nothing I used it for that I couldn't have accomplished with jQuery. I've decided to refactor the Angular code into jQuery and drop the use of the Angular library for now. Based on what I've been reading in the KeystoneJS Google group, Angular.js is losing mindshare to the React.js library anyways. KeystoneJS is redoing their entire back-end in React.js, and so I'm motivated to focus on my energies on learning React.js as well. 

 

  • I captured the steps needed to get KeystoneJS up and running on a VPS in this blog post.
  • This tutorial showed me how to get this website up and running on Port 80
  • I'm working through this tutorial to allow me to point my domain name at a Droplet/VPS.

Note: I used Handlebars instead of the default of Jade as my template of choice. When using the yo keystone command during setup of KeystoneJS, it asks you which one you want to use. If you follow the tutorials on this blog, then make sure you choose Handlebars (hbs), otherwise they won't work.