Watch a demo of Braceana in action here!
Braceana is an attempt to create a dirt simple publishing platform in R/shiny. It is licensed under the AGPL version 3 (see enclosed LICENSE).
- Are you a web developer, looking for a quick-and-dirty CMS for quick publishing?
- Are you looking for lightning fast responsive design, easily managed SEO, or an awesome plugin system based on your your favorite scripting language?
- Are you tired of bloated CMSes capable of doing everything, but being good at nothing - especially not your favorite web development thing?
Then you should probably look somewhere else.
On the other hand, if you're an R developer, analyst, or statistical programmer who shares the love for easy publishing using Rmarkdown, Shiny widgets and ggvis graphics, then Braceana might actually be for you.
Braceana is a simple platform using Rmarkdown (*.Rmd) as its sole publishing format. It is designed to take care of HTML rendering, theming, styling, and online publishing for you. In a similar fashion to Jekyll, it supports Pages and Blog posts and is easily extendable with Shiny widgets like ggvis graphics or RCharts plots. However, unlike Jekyll, Braceana is not easily configurable and does not support any kinds of plugins. It does, however, come with custom CSS support so you can make it look any way you want to, if you want to.
If you're accustomed to customizing Shiny apps and know some HTML, you can easily customize most parts of Braceana to do exactly whatever you want it to.
- Auto-generate HTML from R Markdown files
- Supports pages and blog posts
- Run Shiny widgets and full-scale apps
- Bootstrap based CSS, with custom styling possible
- Full-time hackers familiar with Shiny can customise Braceana to their heart's content
Braceana requires R packages shiny (version >=0.10.1), markdown (version >=0.7.4), and rmarkdown (version >=0.3.3).
Braceana can be run locally using the 'shiny' package, or remotely using a Shiny hosting service like Shinyapps.io.
Start by cloning the Braceana repo from Github (or, alternatively, downloading a zip file containing the repo).
Braceana is ready to use on the fly. Make sure you have the proper dependencies installed, and copy the files found in the examples folder to the pagesand blog folders found in the root folder. Then fire up RStudio and press Run App, or do setwd("my/path/to/braceana") and run shiny::runApp().
Braceana supports publishing to ShinyApps.io. Simply make sure to follow the instructions for activating your account that can found on their web page, and deploy your app (including all pages and blog posts you might want to deploy) using shinyapps::deployApp().
For an example, see this website.
Braceana is still in early development. Please do not expect any response to any support request you might have (although asking nicely definitely helps)! The following is a short list of things that might turn up in future releases:
- Google Analytics support
- URL parser
- Improved theming support
- Input validation for interactive apps (http://shiny.rstudio.com/articles/validation.html)
- Proper meta tag support (useful in blogs)
Braceana is named after Phalaenopsis braceana.