This is a fork of the Default theme that ships with the Mailpile email client re-done as a single page app. The interface & interactions of Mailpile's theme were originaly designed by me Brennan Novak and engineered by the whole team. I started this repo because Mailpile's "back-end has been playing catch up to the user interface for a while" and I wanted to keep experimenting / developing things in the secure email space while @BjarniRunar works on stabilizing the backend.
The goal here is create an interface for the email / messaging client of my your dreams. Thus, I would love to see (and will actively encourage) community around this effort. I hope to find others as inspired as I am to build experimental and interesting email / messaging tools. Come join me :D
My current goal is to make all the data plumbing of this theme work explicitely with the Mailpile API but be architected as a lightweight single page app. Potential directions this repo might evolve once that's achieved are:
- A standalone theme that is installable in Mailpile core
- A Chrome or Firefox OS app
- Packaged in a native mobile wrapper for Android or iOS
- A starter theme for your own Mailpile theme
- Small JS modules that can be re-used in Mailpile core
Another idea is to engineer the code as per a non client specific "spec" like this Offline First Dreamcode made by @gr2m. If that was done and other interesting ideas could become possible:
- Interop with other (non-Mailpile) email backends
- Integration with chat protocols like IRC & Jabber
- Provide a web based interface for Pond or other secure messaging backends
- You can also read these notes and ideas that expand on those points
This is currently just an experiment and in no way a commitment / promise of things to come!
WARNING: This repo is suuuuuuper rough and nowhere near anything anyone should even bother looking at. Seriously, don't waste your time reading any further. These notes are mostly for me as I experiment :P
The requirements your system will need in order to build & run River are
Clone the River repository and change into the directory.
git clone https://github.com/bnvk/River
cd River
Then install the server side & front-end dependencies.
npm install && bower install
Compile the JS portion of the app using Browserify by typing the following
browserify app/main.js -o app/bundle.js
You should be able to run the app now by typing
node server.js
Mailpile currently will not serve the REST API via a JS request coming from a different domain / port due to cross-origin request so as a temporary hack I've added the following snippet to mailpile/httpd.py file
self.send_header('Access-Control-Allow-Credentials', 'true');
self.send_header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', 'http://localhost:8888')
self.send_header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods', 'GET,PUT,POST,DELETE,OPTIONS');
self.send_header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers', 'X-CSRF-Token, X-Requested-With, Accept, Accept-Version, Content-Length, Content-MD5, Content-Type, Date, X-Api-Version');
Depending on how River is further developed / built this will need to be given some thought
Please read through the contributing guidelines. Included are directions for ideas, opening issues, coding standards, and notes on design and development.
Editor preferences are available in the editor config for easy use in common text editors. Read more and download plugins at http://editorconfig.org.
If you'll be developing the JS of the app, you will want to run Watchify instead of Browserify as it automatically rebuilds if any of the source files change. You might need to install Watchify
watchify app/main.js -o app/bundle.js
- Implement build system for the LESS / CSS of the app (currently missing)
- Maybe migrate to using Bootstrap instead of my homebrewed CSS framework
- Fix build & watch to use Grunt or Gulp
- Fix the Browserify loading of template files
- Implement JS unit testing coverage
- Finish porting over and implementing basic Sidebar & Search view
- Implement plugins and interactivity on Search view (tooltips, keybindings, drag & drop)
- Implement Tag views
- Implement Contact views