

Raneto: Markdown-powered knowledge base for Node.js - gilbitron
http://raneto.com

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imjared
Well, that was easy. Went ahead and took our long-standing WIP wiki which was
already markdown and threw it in here. We've been meaning to do something like
this for a while, you just did it.

Agreed with the point about security. We have a public part we want to make
into a general KB but also a private part for internal. If anyone comes up
with something, I'd love to see it.

Lastly, because what comment wouldn't be complete without some sort of
"criticism" on someone else's awesome, hard work, what prompted the decision
to use the /* */ commenting for page-specific config? In my experience (maybe
this is just because I've used jekyll too much) it seems that Yaml frontmatter
is pretty typical for .md file config.

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gilbitron
Thanks. To be honest I just used a /* */ comment block because it was simple,
but I'll have a look at implementing YAML.

~~~
NaNaN
How about gray-matter[1]? It supports YAML, TOML, JSON and Coffee. It can also
auto-detect the type of front-matter.

[1] [https://github.com/assemble/gray-
matter#lang](https://github.com/assemble/gray-matter#lang)

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rpdillon
I played around with this last night. Woke up this morning, visited raneto.com
again, noticed that the website claims that for "commercial" projects, it
requires a per-domain license. Except the source code on Github is licensed
under MIT. I'm not sure how to reconcile those two things.
[http://docs.raneto.com/commercial-
licensing](http://docs.raneto.com/commercial-licensing)

~~~
sbussard
I noticed that too! Why don't they sell it as a service instead of trying to
sell open source code?? Anyone who knows enough to use it knows enough to make
it themselves

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wise_young_man
Do you still have to style the knowledge base to match your site's design or
use a layout?

We've been working on a hosted knowledge base that you drop on a page and it
inherits the design you already have. Our editor supports both WYSIWYG and
Markdown too. Looking to see if people are interested and get feedback.
[http://userdeck.com/guides](http://userdeck.com/guides)

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antjanus
Really cool stuff! I actually wrote a [flat-file
CMS]([https://github.com/AntJanus/popstar-
cms](https://github.com/AntJanus/popstar-cms)) in Node as well, wasn't
disappointed to see that my code and Raneto's code bares a good deal of
similarities!

~~~
gilbitron
Thanks. I actually created a flat-file CMS in PHP called Pico
([http://picocms.org](http://picocms.org)) so I built on some of the lessons I
learned creating Pico when building Raneto.

~~~
antjanus
I'm looking through it, I'm impressed by your plugins. I'm hoping to introduce
that kind of structure into my application (hooks for remote posting, etc.).
But gotta add one piece of functionality at a time!

I haven't looked through your code completely so let me ask you something,
what kind of an object do you pass to your templates? Do you pass the entire
tree of information (all contents parsed as a JS object), or do you pass the
current + children + parent?

I'm just wondering. What I'm currently doing is sending the top-level content,
current page, and children along with all of their information.

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resu_nimda
I had almost this exact idea recently, because I really wanted a minimal
KB/wiki that I could edit in my text editor and collaborate on with others.
It's encouraging to know that others feel the same way. You may have a
competitor in a short while ;)

~~~
zz1
Please, let us know!

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ivan_ah
Nice work! Is there any difference between a knowledge base and a wiki?

And while on the topic of wikis, I wanted to plug dokuwiki which is an awesome
feature-rich flat file wiki. I've been managing a lot of my writing as .txt
files, even the ones with lots of math blocks---thank you MathJax! Also, the
docutexit plugin allows me to export as .tex.

~~~
gilbitron
I suppose the difference between Raneto and a "wiki" is that Raneto doesn't
have all the multi-author features and collaboration that a wiki offers.

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erlend_sh
Cool! I've been hoping to see more wiki/knowledgebase type static site
generators.

I will admit that I fear for its longevity though. Any particular reason why
you decided against building on top of something like assemble.io or
wintersmith.io? Probably would have gotten a lot of functionality for free.

~~~
gilbitron
I did consider simply building a KB with other static site generators, but I
wanted something specifically designed for Knowledgebases and easy to setup
and use.

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johnchristopher
I have a question: what is the typical workflow for a user to "update" a
markdown file on a static site that generates html ?

I'm okay with ftp being so 90's but I don't see regular joes git-pushing their
website.

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T-A
Doesn't seem to work on Windows. Links resolve to
[http://localhost:3000/C:/Users/..](http://localhost:3000/C:/Users/..). i.e.
full path to content directory.

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nemothekid
The licensing is confusing. The GitHub project is released under MIT, but the
site says you need to have a commercial license to use the software?

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chanux
The paid license is for commercial products. But that's still confusing.

 _Raneto may be used in commercial projects with the one-time purchase of a
commercial license._

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nemothekid
It just seems that the commercial license is incompatible with the MIT
license. With the MIT license there is nothing stopping someone from using it
in a commercial product, the MIT license doesn't have that restriction.

Even more confusing is if someone were to fork the project, would a user of
that fork need to pay Raneto to use it a commercial license?

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bckmn
It would be nice to have some sort of security option around accessing the KB.
Does anyone know of something like this with a login system?

~~~
gilbitron
Raneto is secure because it doesn't have any kind of interface that can be
hacked (e.g. a login page). To make changes to Raneto content you need to have
access to your server file system.

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nsfmc
i think the question was asking for most of the content publicly accessible
but some of the content hidden behind a login. google sites does something
like that but i haven't seen any flat-file cms'es that offer it.

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Vaskivo
Why the need for Node.js? Couldn't this simply be a static site? (I know there
are tons of these, but most are "blog oriented)

~~~
gilbitron
You could just create a static HTML site yes, but getting it generated for you
from Markdown files is super handy. To generate it on the fly it needs to be
powered by some kind of server (e.g. Node, PHP, Python etc). Nodejs was just a
good choice of platform for this kind of thing.

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iaskwhy
Sort of related: how do people handle images when using markdown documents for
local/offline storage?

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NaNaN
I just put it in a specific directory, like root/data/images

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NaNaN
Good work. :) But without the cross reference module, it is just like a simple
blog system.

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gilbitron
It could easily be "hacked" into a blog if you wanted to do that. At its core
it is just a static site generator.

~~~
NaNaN
No, I don't need another static blog. I mean (bi-directional) cross reference
is very important for memorization and even better than a simple search
engine. Maybe you can use Disqus comment box to get related article but that's
not good enough.

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Mitranim
Just what my colleague needed for our small KB redesign. Thanks for
discovering!

~~~
jbverschoor
Yep.. Was also looking for a markdown kb. Pref. with flat files

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abeiz
Any plans to integrate API blueprints?

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pros22su
Looks very nice

