medienhaus/

Customizable, modular, free and open-source environment for decentralized, distributed communication and collaboration without third-party dependencies.

Website — Fediverse

medienhaus/ cms

medienhaus-cms is a decentralized-first, room-based content management system (CMS) based on the Matrix protocol. The project was used for Berlin University of the Arts’ digitally enhanced Rundgang in 2021 and 2022.

Development

Installation

npm install

Installs all of the application’s dependencies.

Configuration

Configuration happens in two places: once via environment variables and secondly via the src/config.json file.

To start developing locally, just copy the supplied .env.local.example file to .env.local and adjust the values of the variables to your liking. Check the .env.extended.example file for more available variables, which you can also modify in your .env.local file.

Secondly copy the provided src/config.example.json to src/config.json. Same here: Check out the provided src/config.extended.example.json to see which other configuration options are available. Beyond that you can find a more detailed documentation of every configuration variable at the end of this very README file.

Available Scripts

In the project directory, you can run:

npm start

Runs the application in development mode. Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

The page will reload if you make edits. You will also see any lint errors in the console.

npm run build

Builds the application for production to the build folder. It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance. The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.

See the section about Create React App deployment for more information.

Learn More

You can learn more in the Create React App documentation.

To learn React, check out the React documentation.

Configuration Documentation

(compare to src/config.example.json and src/config.extended.example.json)

item

You can define different types of items the cms is supposed to support.

This gives you the ability to use different blueprints for different types.

Blueprints

Define which of the following UI elements should be visible in the /create route.

• image: Add a main image to your content.
• contributors: Gives users the ability to invite contributors who can edit the content.
• location: Adds a UI to add a location to the content. You can specify a default location with the separate 'location' key.
• time: Adds a UI to add a time window to content.
• tags: Adds a UI to add tags to content.

Allowed content types

You can define which types of content are listed in the dropdown of the /create route.

Each type of content can have one or all of the following:

heading
text
list
quote
code
image
audio
file
video
livestream
playlist
bigbluebutton

pages

Any pages defined here will show up in the navigation.

You can simply add a “page” as a content type and manage them from the /content route. Simply add the content’s room id to the config.

💡 This also means that any user can add pages to the navigation bar!

You can also add rooms you are not managing with the cms, as long as they follow the medienhaus scheme, or have a second medienhaus-cms instance you use to moderate pages.

languages

Define all languages you want the CMS to support as ISO 639-1 codes.

Cannot be empty! At least one language has to be defined.

If more than one language is specified, a dropdown appears in the /create route so users are able to create content in the different languages.

language[0] is the default language selected and also the selected language for the topic of the content space.

sites

Define which sites should be visible and which functions should be available in each route.

account

• avatar: if users are able to change their profile picture from within the /account route
• mail: gives users the ability to add one or more email addresses to their account
• name: gives users the ability to change their display name

moderate

• invite: Invite users to specific rooms you are moderating
• rightsManagement: promote users to moderators within a specified context
• manageContexts: add or remove context spaces or sub-context spaces
  • showRoot: if enabled the root of all contexts is displayed in the manage context dropdown.
  • treeDepth: depth of the tree shown after selecting a context. defaults to 1.

video

the video object defines which video platforms are supported by the cms: There is built in support for Vimeo and YouTube, which needs to be activated.

 "video": {
            "youtube": true,
            "vimeo": true,
            "custom": {
              "label": "Peertube",
              "baseUrl": "https://peertube.server.com/w/",
              "iframeUrl": "https://peertube.server.com/embed/",
              "uploadUrl": ""https://stream.udk-berlin.de/videos/upload"
            }
        }

‼️ The baseUrl of your custom platform needs to be the exact url which is going to be replaced by iframeUrl for the iframe preview.

usersToInviteToNewContexts

All users specified in this array are automatically invited to new context spaces if they are created through the manage context UI in /manage and promoted to power level 50.

If no users are given, the context spaces are created without inviting any other users.