Now that WriteFreely has been out for a while – and as we approach the January launch of v1.0 – I’d like to ask everyone using / administering their own site so far:
Your answers will be an enormous help for deciding what makes it into v1.0. Thanks in advance!
Installing my instance:
Thanks for the feedback! To answer:
Today the only way is to open registration, let the person sign up, then close it again – so a better way is definitely important. For this, we’re thinking of creating a way to generate invite links, similar to how Mastodon does it. Would that work for you? Would you want some way to manually add a new user as an admin, as well?
There’s no actual email functionality built-in right now, but once we have features like automated password resetting, you’ll be able to hook up Mailgun or another provider for this.
Generating invite links sounds lovely! Also a command line tool for adding and removing users much similar to create-admin
Hello
One feature I miss is the ability to class posts in categories, and browse them to see only posts from one category.
I guess this can be achieved with tags (more powerful), but we need a way to display all available tags from a blog to the visitor, because he can’t guess them.
I recently installed an instance of WriteFreely here and having tinkered with it all day I would say the most glaring missing features are the following:
/me/c before being able to click account settings in the dropdown under my username - this is quite clunky and I would expect to be able to access that from the drop down in the write view/admin route we can edit the About page and the privacy page. Personally i’d rather pages be something that can can be added/removed at leisure so you ship with about and privacy included but we can add additional pages if we choose to and select which templates/*.tmpl they use. This would provide a nice level of customisation and allow instance operators to create static pages.My wish list
For myself my instance will be mostly for my own attention. But would like to try and integrate my Pixelfed account and my Mastodon account together with WriteFreely.
My Mastodon account cannot access the data from WriteFreely - I get a 503 error…? It may be because I am still running the WF instance under an IP rather than a dedicated domain…? I don’t know. PixelFed cant locate my fediverse address for WF…?
Maybe I need to know more about how these all work together.
So. Integration in a Fediverse sense is important. My personal focus is analog photography, so any future image based abilities probably useful.
Having recently tinkered with both single & multiple instance of the blog in development environment on my localserver, I would like to point out a few things
For me, a comment system with fediverse support (like Plume does)
And a real and correct support for federation (ActivityPub). It’s actualy brocken
When in Blog View mode and logged-in. A Log-Out link in the menu would be useful.
Some way of adding Social Media img/text links in the header and/or footer area.
addendum:
In addition to the above ‘Social-Media links’, Which I think is quite important for folks to be able to show.
Under Customisation -
Some kind of choice between One/Two column layout with a ‘Tag Cloud’, ‘Date based’ or ‘Category’ navigation AKA HUGO 
So as blogs grow readers are not forced to click back through ‘Older’ articles.I know there is a mix here of what could be implemented in the Core and what could be implemented through a Plugin structure.
At the end of the day, if folks want to load up their pages with endless additional infrastructure that is up to them. For me a few carefully chosen and essential additions to the product at its base, a philosophy that works to keep it that way is important. From my own world experiences I know how important it is to keep in mind your OWN reasons for beginning a project and not let others take over and in doing so lose the raison d’etre
As I use Write.as on a regular basis, one thing is really missing for me is a minimal search function for my posts/blog. Something minimal like Lunarjs to run searches on the client-side… Or an integration with Algolia community solution…
I’d like to second the need for a search function feature that Aris made. Even for a minimalist blogging platform, I consider this a core need with perhaps a medium-level priority. Specifically, my thoughts on this are: A search keyword input box for an individual blog. This is regardless whether the blog is public or private. I don’t see searching through all one’s blogs as having the same importance, though if that can be easily done without adverse system resources implications, it would also be a helpful feature. If possible, simple AND, OR, ANDNOT logic for the keyword searches.
What I’m doing now is exporting my blogs, and then searching with a simple php program to do this search client-side. But then, whenever I make changes, a new export needs to be made. It would be nice to have the search feature built-in.
I know this is a v1.0 “crucial” thread, but I have a hard time in my brain ranking things. I’m going to give my general list of wants and try my best to give some sense of priorities for me. Some of these are going to prompt “well, yeah, we’re doing that”, but I’ll leave them on my list anyway.
ETA: I just noticed that on WriteFreely sites, while the blog index page, at the bottom, links to the site’s main page, blog posts themselves do not, and only link all the way back to WriteFreely. That doesn’t help discoverability when a reader comes to a blog post.
Something statically typed for that sweet sweet safety, like the super fast https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch might be better 