Journal is an another blogging platform because Ghost came in first and we both focused on one thing, publishing. Journal attempts to ease out publishing and sharing your thoughts to the world with our easy-to-use platform. All you need to do is write, and click publish.

Journal is easy to configure and you can do whatever you want because it is powered by one of PHP's popular and powerful framework, Laravel. So if you're a developer and you wanted to tinker or modify some of its functionality, you're free to go.

First of all you need the following:

• Apache/Nginx Server
• PHP version >= 5.5.9
• OpenSSL PHP Extension
• PDO PHP Extension
• Mbstring PHP Extension
• Tokenizer PHP Extension
• Node JS
• Composer

Once you have those things installed you're good to go!

1. Download Journal from its Github repository.
2. Unzip it in the location you want.
3. Open up your terminal
4. Download Composer. To download Composer, type in the terminal curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
5. Install Journal's/Laravel dependencies, composer install
6. Once Composer finished downloading, setup your database connection. You can copy .env.example in the root directory to .env and input your database credentials or open app/config.php.
7. Start Journal! http://localhost:8000

** NOTE: Make sure that the storage folder and its contents are writable. Please create also an upload folder inside the public folder because all of your contents that will uploaded will be stored in this location. Make sure also that upload folder is writable.

We assume at this point that you have installed PHP, Node JS. Just follow the steps and problems won't come to you.

Clone Journal

git clone git://github.com/ricomonster/journal-blogging-platform.git
cd journal-blogging-platform

Install Journal/Laravel's dependency using Composer. If you don't have Composer, type in the terminal curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php to download it.

# PHP things
composer install

# Node JS things
npm install 

Install Gulp and Bower

npm install -g gulp bower

Build it!

gulp build

Do you want this thing to run like in production?

gulp build-prod

Fire it up!

php artisan serve
# or
php -S <localhost or your public IP>:8080 -t /public

Yay, You're now good to go!

Ghost is such a wonderful application and I followed it since their Kickstarter days. I believed in their goals so that created me an idea to create a another blogging platform. I also believed in this quote said by some guy that "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery".

The default theme is Casper, also imitated the default theme of Ghosts. If you encounter this problem, first make sure that Gulp is installed then fire up your terminal and run gulp get-theme-assets.

The Journal Blogging Platform is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license