Introducing Pure Comments (and Pure Commons)
A few weeks ago I introduced Pure Blog a simple PHP based blogging platform that I've since moved to and I'm very happy. Once Pure Blog was done, I shifted my focus to start improving my commenting system. I ended that post by saying:
At this point it's battle tested and working great. However, there's still some rough edges in the code, and security could definitely be improved. So over the next few weeks I'll be doing that, at which point I'll probably release it to the public so you too can have comments on your blog, if you want them.
I've now finished that work and I'm ready to release Pure Comments to the world. 🎉
I'm really happy with how Pure Comments has turned out; it slots in perfectly with Pure Blog, which got me thinking about creating a broader suite of apps under the Pure umbrella.
Enter Pure Commons
I've had Simple.css since 2022, and now I've added Pure Blog and Pure Comments to the fold. So I decided I needed an umbrella to house these disparate projects. That's where Pure Commons comes in.
My vision for Pure Commons is to build it into a suite of simple, privacy focussed tools that are easy to self-host, and have just what you need and no more.
What's next for Pure Commons?
Well, concurrent to working on Pure Comments, I've also started building a fully managed version that people will be able to use for a small monthly fee. That's about 60% done at this point, so I should be releasing that over the next few weeks.
In the future I plan to add a managed version of Pure Blog too, but that will be far more complex than a managed version of Pure Comments. So I think that will take some time.
I'm also looking at creating Pure Guestbook, which will obviously be a simple, self-hosted guestbook along the same vein as the other Pure apps. This should be relatively simple to build, as a guestbook is basically a simplified commenting system, so most of the code is already exists in Pure Comments.
Looking beyond Pure Guestbook I have some other ideas, but you will have to wait and see...
In the meantime, please take a look as Pure Comments - download the source code, take it for a spin, and provide any feedback/bugs you find.
If you have any ideas for apps I could add to the Pure Commons family, please get in touch.