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## Introduction PolarPress Pagebuilder is part of the PolarPress content management system developed by Arctic Software A/S. We've decided to publish this as a seperate package in order to open up the possibility for our end users and customers to customize and tailor their own design, functionality and layout for their webpages running our CMS software. You can download this package either as a standalone zip/tar.gz compressed file or through git and run the PageBuilder on your local machine in a development environment to make, improve, and test various page components and design ideas for your website. As of 06.05.2025, this package comes bundled with a few page blocks/components to give you an idea how to make new ones. These components are based on the design of the [Østfold Milsim](https://ostfoldmilsim.no) website. There is also a [Test ØMS website](https://test.ostfoldmilsim.no) populated with test data, if you want to test the page builder in the full CMS proper. Keep on reading if you want to gain elevated privileges there to test out things. ## Features * Full WYSIWYG drag and drop page builder * No limitation on what you can edit, as long as the block author have made provisions to edit what is intended to edit * Pluggable and modular design that lets you also fetch external data from the CMS through Eloquent ## Installation Here is a step by step guide to install this software package and get a development environment running on your own machine ### Requirements Before you download this software package, make sure you have the following requirements installed. This software works on most operating systems (Windows, Linux, MacOS), as long as you have the other software requirements installed. 1. [PHP](https://php.net) Version >= 8.2 2. [Composer](https://getcomposer.org/), a dependency and package manager for PHP 3. [Node and NPM](https://nodejs.org/en) Node is a runtime environment for Javascript, and NPM is a dependency and package manager for Node 4. [Git](https://git-scm.com) Version control software. Not required, but recommended if you want to contribute and upload page components and designs to this repository ### Installation & Configuration steps Once you have installed and correctly configured all of these requirements (check that each software tool is accessible via path from your command line), you can download the Page Builder either as a compressed file or using git (from the command line): ``` git clone https://git.arcticsoftware.no/arcticsoftware/polarpress-pagebuilder.git ``` Change into the directory ``` cd polarpress-pagebuilder ``` and copy/rename the `.env.example` to `.env` This is the global environment variable file which contains all the settings needed to run the application. You do not need to edit this file, the default settings are fine. As standard, the page builder uses SQLite as a database backend (and that is fine for most intended purposes of this application), but if you want to use something like Mysql or PostresDB, you need to edit the environment variable file to facilitate this. First we need to fetch the required libraries used by the application via composer. Run: ``` composer update ``` Next you need to generate a random key for cryptography operations (that will be stored in the .env file): ``` php artisan key:generate ``` If you get something like *"'php' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."* you need to make sure that php is installed per the requirements, and that the operating system has the php executable accesible from within it's path environment variable. You might need to open and close your console to reload the environment path variable. Next we want to update and fetch all package dependencies for Node with NPM: ``` npm update ``` Next we generate the neccessary database tables in the database with the migration command: ``` php artisan migrate ``` And that's it! ### Running local development server Make sure you're inside the directory where you downloaded/cloned *polarpress-pagebuilder*, and run the following commands: ``` php artisan serve npm run dev ``` These commands needs to be run concurrently (in two seperate terminals). Go to http://localhost:8000 and you should be greeted with the welcome screen. ### Serving images to the application We haven't ported our the image handling, uploading and administration interface over from the CMS, so if you want to serve images to the application (that lets you pick and choose images you can use in the components), you need to use the `pagebuilder:make-imagedb` artisan command from the command line to generate the database file system representation. Place the file/folder structure of your images inside the folder `public/imagedb` and run the command: ``` php artisan pagebuilder:make-imagedb ``` And the images will become available for use inside the application. ## FAQ **Q:** *Why isn't this software released as a composer package? Will it ever be?*