Overview

Periodic is a pure information and content management system. Periodic is designed for you to implement your own information architecture, unlike some traditional content management solutions, there are no assumptions made about your data model, which allows for information hierarchies and taxonomies to be extremely malleable.

Content

Entities

Items

Items are the base content entity, when used in conjunction with content types you can define new types of items with additional custom fields.

Complicated taxonomies and information hierarchies can be created by classifying items with content types, tags and categories.

The Drupal equivalent would be a node, the wordpress equivalent would be a post.

Collections

Collections are a generic grouping of items, they can be used to provide gallery, listicle, and slide show functionilty

Like Items, you can create complicated information heirarchies by using custom attributes with content types, tags and categories.

In equivalent content management systems, collections are like galleries.

(Media) Assets

Assets are uploaded files, you can create complicated information models and add additional fields with content types

Attributes & Taxonomies

Categories

Categories are an entity attribute that can be nested into logical heirachries, additional attributes can be added with content types

Tags

Tags are an entity attribute that can be nested into logical heirachries, additional attributes can be added with content types

Classification

Content Types

Content Types are collections of additional attributes that can be added to Entities and Attributes.

Content Types can be used to create "podcasts", "images", "slideshows", "listicles", "videos" and more by adding additional properties to items, collections, assets, tags and categories.

Themes

Themes contain views and routes and are installed by uploading to the content/themes directory.

Installing/Switching themes

Changing themes can be done through the admin extension interface or manually in your application environment configuration json files.

Extensions

Extensions are simply node modules that are name-spaced by the extension name prefix 'periodicjs.ext.'. The index.js file is loaded during runtime if the extension is enabled.

Any part of the application can be overwritten via extensions; routes, controllers, views, etc.

Installing extensions

$ npm install periodicjs.ext.myextension $ npm install periodicjs.ext.myextension --skip-install-periodic-ext

You can install extensions from the command line via npm, by installing with the --skip-install-periodic-ext command line argument, your extension configuration file will not be modified.

Configuring, Removing, Enabling and Disabling extensions

The state of all extensions are in the content/extensions/extensions.json configuration file and is loaded at runtime.

Extensions can be enabled/disabled/removed either manually from extensions.json or from the admin extension interface.

Configuration

Application Configuration

Your application loads content/config/config.json at runtime, here you can modify the runtime environment (or via the command line).

config.json will override any settings in your environment specific configurations

Database Configuration

The Database configuration settings are located in content/config/database.js, database.js is loaded at runtime. You can modify the environment specific database configuration here.

Runtimes

Periodic runs with a production grade process manager called PM2, this allows for you application to restart only when necessary and runs as a process in the background.

Starting Periodic

$ npm start

Periodic runs with npm, the exact commands are in package.json.

$ npm start -p [port] -e [environment]

The run time environment can be modified with command line arguments for the specific environment and port settings. WARNING: anything in config.json will override these settings

$ npm run nd

For development purposes only, the nd script runs with nodemon

Stopping Periodic

$ npm stop $ pm2 kill periodicjs

Both npm stop and pm2 kill will stop the periodic daemon.

Restarting Periodic

$ npm run reload

npm run reload, reloads the pm2 daemon.