Seams NPM | npm.io

Seams is a minimal, markup-driven, static-site CMS.

Installation

npm i seams

Seams persists content using MongoDB. A mongodb:// URI is required.

Usage

Seams is markup-driven, meaning that the user can create standard, valid HTML pages using specific data attributes that will later be injected with dynamic content when served. For example:

<html>
  <body>
    <h1 data-content="header">This is the default header</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Tells Seams to inject the header content for the current page into this h1 tag. If no such content exists, the h1 will default to the This is the default header text.

Unlike most content management systems, Seams has no backend other than a single admin login page. All content editing is done directly on the pages one wishes to edit.

Starting a Seams server is as easy as:

const http = require('http');
const path = require('path');
const seams = require('seams');

const server = http.createServer(
  seams({
    secret: 'my secret key',
    dir: path.join(__dirname, 'web'),
    db: 'mongodb://my:mongo@database'
  })
);

server.listen(8080);

This will serve static content from the web/ directory while injecting dynamic content wherever a Seams data attribute is found. Valid Seams attributes are:

data-content - Renders the innerHTML of the element it is found on.
data-src - Sets the src attribute of the element it is found on (useful for img tags).
data-href - Sets the href attribute of the element it is found on (useful for a tags).
data-text - Sets the innerText of the element it is found on.
data-background - Sets the background-image style property.

Getting started

After creating a directory with static HTML/CSS/JS files and acquiring a MongoDB URI, create a server.js file as shown above. The seams function takes in an options object and returns a HTTP request/response handler function. The options object can have the following properties:

{
  db: <string>,
  dir: <string>,
  secret: <string>,
  [expires: <number>]
}

Where db is the URI for the MongoDB, dir is the path to the directory containing the static files to be served, secret is the secret key used for hashing admin webtokens, and expires is an optional number to change the time (in milliseconds) until cached pages expire. The default cache expiration time is 5 minutes.

Creating an admin

Initially running the server with the flags --seams-admin-name and --seams-admin-password will create an admin account. For example:

node server.js --seams-admin-name=MyAdmin --seams-admin-password=password123

Editing content

Once the server is running, navigate to /seams and log in with the credentials created from the command line. Once logged in, navigate to the page to edit, click on a content area (a bubble will appear around the cursor when hovering over an editable content area) and edit it with the panel that appears. Saving these changes will persist it to the database and the page will then render with the new content.

Elements given the data-content attribute are editable with basic markdown syntax: