In fast-growing world of WordPress and Drupal, Postleaf has emerged as a simple yet refresh blogging platform. The open source offering supports PHP and MySQL and runs on Apache server.
Cory LaViska, the founder of Surreal CMS, has designed Postleaf with an ultimate idea to deliver a “simple, beautiful” publishing platform. To counter leading solutions like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, LaViska developed an inline editing solution for his CMS. This unique feature utilises a fast rendering engine on the platform to let users edit their stuff right with all ease and simplicity.
If the inline editing becomes complex, users have a zen mode that turns off all the styles on the platform and brings up just a clean area to write. This is similar to the fullscreen mode on WordPress.
“I built Postleaf because I wanted to ‘thin down’ the blogging experience into a minimal, beautiful, installable application,” LaVaska wrote in a ProductHunt discussion post.
Apart from the inline editing, Postleaf has custom-designed themes. There is templating system Handlebars to let users themselves design themes for their blogs.
LaViska has leveraged his past knowledge with Surreal CMS and used rapid microframeworks Slim along with LightnCandy rendering engine to provide a faster experience for the bloggers who have used WordPress, Drupal or even Medium in the past.
Although the interface of Postleaf is inspired by Ghost publishing platform, the developer has used PHP/MySQL over Node.js and some other environments to give an ease for its further developments. A repository has also been created on GitHub to let developers expand the platform with their tweaking skills.
The latest beta version of Postleaf is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3. It requires a web server running on at least PHP 5.5 and MySQL 5.5.3.
