FleekSite — The Open Web Development Platform (and my baby)
A Personal Project I’m Very Proud Of.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to write about today, I had mentioned that I wanted to post high quality content and that I’d talk about FleekSite, a project of mines. So I figured this would be appropriate.
I work at a Digital Marketing Agency, we work with Travel Organisations, a part of this marketing involves building websites for them if needed.
So this really sparked my interest in building websites and api’s as I was mostly working on micro-services for marketing.
I decided I’d build a platform for hosting websites, not only would it allow me to host websites for myself but also make a business out of it and start earning some money outside of my regular job.
Enter — FleekSite, not the original name but i figure “Material Management System” might be too much of a mouthful.
I started working on the FleekSite CMS (Material Management System or MMS for short), late last year, but began putting serious and deep work into it around February of this year, as I had people coming to me asking for Websites and I had certain goals I needed to reach, which required more funds, plus I’d own my own company! Wouldn’t that be great!
Ohh boy was it a lot of work — an entire hosting platform. A secure website management system that would allow for various types of websites to be built on it, using any domain and of course it had to be fast and well optimised. I learnt so much during the development of this project, I had to be going back and forth and adjusting things, adding new fields to the database, changing access methods. Until I finally did a full re-write of the system just 3 months ago, after which I definitely added more features. There are still some things I’ve yet to do, like adding the UI to allow web hooks, and making the CMS headless so that anyone with their API key can create a fully customised panel of their own, there’s also adding themes to the current panel.
There are quite a few things that I did get done, and I’m very proud of what I’ve achieved. Right now, it’s a developer platform — but as more developers come on and build more templates anyone will be able to jump in and use it without knowing any bit of code!
Why do I say it’s a developer platform? Well, there aren’t much templates on it right now, and the average person doesn’t know HTML, CSS or JS. So to use the platform, you’d have to at least know the basics.
However, one super cool feature I’m proud of is the template uploads. Though it is only compatible with Google Chrome, this allows you to upload a static site and just like that you’re online, no extra work needed (assuming it was built properly lol).
Right now, anyone can go to https://admin.fleeksite.com, sign up and build their websites. I’ll list out a few of the features I’m hoping will drive adoption to the platform, which is by no means exhaustive and in no particular order, and then I’ll list a few features I want to add later on, when it’s start generating a little more income.
Features:
- Lead Generation, Management and Real-Time Email and SMS Notifications
- Post Scheduling and Expiring
- Automatic Publishing to Twitter
- Team Membership — Writers, Designers, Marketers, Admins
- User Accounts & Membership — People who sign up on your website
- Private Posts — For Members Only
- Multi-Site Management — You can host and manage multiple sites, no hard limits set
- Fast Response Times — A Fairly Optimised Website on the platform can be delivered in under 100ms and fully render in under 500ms.
- SEO Optimisations — We automatically add Meta Information to the headers of every website, including basic Meta Tags, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, JsonLD and App Meta.
- File Uploads — A basic file storage area where you can upload new files and get old ones.
11. Bits — Pieces of information that’s available on every rendered page, that allows you to easily change parts of a webpage without knowing how to code.
12. A Themes section — Easily apply new themes to your website, and see the name of the designer who created the Theme.
13. Post Interactions — Like and Comment on posts — event like and comment on those comments.
14. In Depth Analytics Reports — Aside from seeing your websites activity in the admin panel, you also get in depth performance reports on your website weekly and monthly.
15. Image Resizing API — This comes with all the sites on the platform, paid or free.
Features I want to add:
- Webhook Panel — a place to easily add your webhook endpoints and choose what events trigger the broadcasts.
- Theme Developer Exposure — Have the developer who created the theme more prominently acknowledged and also have a link back to the developers URL/Page if they have one, internal or external.
- Text Editor Choices — Right now, I’m using QuillJS as the text editor for the admin panel, however I’d like to give the option for users to choose, maybe CkEditor or Summernote next.
- Page Builder — A drag and drop or component selection based web page builder to make the platform more accessible and usable for regular users that don’t know how to code.
- PayPal Payments/Subscription — Right now I send invoices manually, but this is in progress, about 1/3 way complete.
- E-commerce Solutions — Using a service like Stripe or BrainTree to accept payments on all sites.
- Geolocation Support — Add Geo Tagging to posts, using the Google Maps API.
- Admin Themes — To cater to more specific use cases.
- Headless CMS — To allow complete custom and separate admin panels.
- Item Tracking and Invoicing — To allow people who use the platform for products to have a more specified and clear experience working with the admin.
RoadMap
I’m getting a few more clients each month and the platform is coming along nicely, there are a few more killer features that may even be more attractive that what I’ve listed here already, but I’m not quite ready to reveal them just yet.
What I do intend to do however is let you know what I’m really most focused on right now — Payments.
The first will be PayPal so I can stop sending monthly Invoices and just send reminder emails and notifications in the admin.
The second will be —Invoicing and Product Tracking, so even if you’re not accepting payments online directly, or maybe you’re using some external service to accept payments, you can still easily track your products in the admin panel.
Thirdly — Stripe Payments, so users can accept payments on their websites.
Fourthly — The Webhook Panel, just for the convenience of anyone who might find this useful (maybe they use an external CRM).
That’s all for right now, once these features are added, tested and verified, I’ll move on to the rest of the features I want to add, like the Geo Location and Themes.
Thanks for reading, till next time! (I’m thinking something more technical or personal instead of another project post.)