Whitmir is an online tool for writing books (and blogs), and is intended to be as simple as possible. The project is a small-scale tool that I'm writing in my free time. And the design has been implemented to be as simple as possible to try and increase the chances of being able to finish it with the small amount of freetime that I have to code in a given day.
Right now I have the basic functionality implemented. Meaning that I have the general layout, connection to Google Drive, books, chapters and a basic editor working, so the next step will be to focus on the rest of the functionality, before coming back to work on the editor toolbar for the final completion. To keep myself focused, the remaining tasks to be implemented are listed below.
- Options for Book
- Export as ePub
- Settings
- Manual
- About
- Support
- Implement Toolbar
- Re-Order Chapters
With the options for the book, the main functionality here is the category. When we click on the toggle, we want to populate the select dropdown with the existing categories. The other two options that I want to include at the moment are cover (yes or no) and whether to include a table of contents or not.
This is part of the core functionality and I should probably jump ahead and implement this as far as proof of concept goes. Basically each book is a folder with a list of html files acting as each chapter. Exporting the ePub book will create the xml file needed to index all of the html chapters and save it inside the folder. We will then loop through all of the files in the folder, and add them to a zip file. And we will finally download the zip as a file with a .epub extension.
Not sure what I'll put here yet. Maybe things like theme, about the author, font size. For now I can make a placeholder page that gets displayed when the option is clicked.
At this point, somewhat similar to settings as I should make a placeholder first. But in this case I should probably make videos to describe specifically what the tool is for, who it is intended for, and how to use it.
Right now this option opens this Github page, which is pretty user unfriendly. In this case too, I should probably add a page that descibes whitmir as an open-source tool, where you are in control of your own data. Give the link for the Github page. And provide the text for the terms of service and the privacy policy.
Right now this options opens the Ko-fi page. It would probably be a good idea to use the Ko-fi widget to give small note. (I'm broke af, a few dollars helps a lot), and maybe provide some QR codes for BAT or DOGE coin donations. Suggesting people use brave would also probably be a good idea, as that would let people support for free.
This is probably going to be the most annoying to implement. I tried Quilljs, which was nice because it ended up being really easy to implement the toolbar. But otherwise wasn't what I wanted with respect to how they handle the data with the Delta format (i was hoping for something more direct HTML). Right now I've switched to TinyMCE, which is good for HTML editing, but so far I haven't seen anything that allows for a custom toolbar to be implemented similar to Quilljs. I might try other editors, or I can try and write a toolbar for TinyMCE (hopefully not). But we can leave this until later as the other functionality isn't dependent on this.
For chapters there are a few nice-to-have features that I want to implement. Being able to drag to re-arrange chapters would be a nice to have feature. Adding sub-headers into the chapter list would be really nice to have. Being able to view chapter revisions would be a really really nice feature to have. And I haven't thought too much about how I want to implement deleting chapters as far as moving them into the trash.