Ebl: the embeddable blog

Ebl is a blog engine (or platform? or framework?) created to be fast and simple but, above all, to be extremely easy to include in an existing website.

WARNING! This repository is still in alpha release. Lots of things (like docs) are missing.

Features

Ebl, despite being very light, comes with several advantages compared with other "heavy" blog platforms:

First: it's really light! The core of Ebl is just a single JS library smaller than 35 KByes! You just drop it inside your <head> tag, tell in which container you want to put your blog and...
It fits perfectly inside the webpage! The style is inherited from your base CSS and the WYSIWYG editor shows exactly how the post will be formatted once published. Want some more catchy graphics? In this case...
You can customize it using a template engine! Very easy to understand, just write in HTML with some keywords to fill elements like the post title and the body. So what's behind the simple Javascript code? There is...
A serverless database! Let's face it, blogs don't need huge amount of data to be pushed in enormous SQL servers, right? Ebl stores all your posts as JSON files in a single, handly folder in your website. In this way...
It's extremely fast! Data access is performed (and cached) in few milliseconds and the interface is updated asyncronously while navigating. No more bottlenecks due to a slow MySQL server. It's so easy to read and export the contents of these files that...
You can even use an API! Ebl provides a set of endpoints to extract your posts and use them in other parts of the website without actually use the blog. You can, for example, extract a preview of the 3 most recent posts in your homepage.

Requirements

Ebl is conceived to run on a PHP 5.4+ server and it's compatible with IE 8+, Firefox 29+, Safari 4+, Chrome.

Usage

Let the code speak for me:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Ebl!</title>
</head>

<body>
    
    <!-- this div will be filled with the Ebl interface -->
    <div id="put-me-here"></div>
    
    <!-- include the Ebl JS at the end of the page -->
    <script type="text/javascript" src="ebl/ebl.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        // tell Ebl what element to use
        Ebl.init("put-me-here", {
            postsPerPage: 3
        });
    </script>
</body>

</html>

The documentation is in the works, you can have a taste in the Wiki.

What's powering Ebl

Ebl whould be nothing without the help of some cool libraries:

Flywheel for the serverless database
Tobscure's JSON API to build a well-formatted API in PHP
Smarty, a fast and simple PHP template engine
wysihtml, the typewriter for the modern web
AlertifyJS, for beautiful web dialogs

License