It has only been one day since CouchPress was kindly hosted by the great services Nodester and Iris Couch but in that time, I have come up with the first release of CouchPress dubbed 'Version 0.1'. You can download it right now here.

I must stress that this version is not production ready, nor anywhere near that stage. However, I have decided to release my first work-in-progress in the hope that CouchPress becomes a project that is built/hacked with by the NodeJS community and not just me. So please send pull requests or submit issues on the Github Page and feel free to email me or give me a yell on my twitter handle (@koostudios) if you want to help out or give some feedback.

Why I'm Releasing this Version

It may seem pretty silly to release a version of CouchPress when it is very limited in usability but I wanted to release this version to show off the foundations of CouchPress and provide learning opportunities. With this release, I hope to show like-minded hackers and developers the vision I have for a beautiful, lightweight and modular blog and content management system. I also hope that other developers will be encouraged to write similarly beautiful and elegant solutions on NodeJS.

Furthermore, I am fully aware that the current implementation of CouchPress is not very easy to install or pass around. In this release, I hope to gain some feedback from people on how best to offer CouchPress so that installation and implementation is an absolute breeze. And, with this feedback I also want to find out how best to create plugins for CouchPress so that they are very easy to install and upgrade.

What's in Version 0.1?

Version 0.1 comes with a considerable amount of work on top of the very simple blogging engine that was featured in my blog tutorial. These include:

• Human readable creation times using Moment.js
• Ability to view single posts
• Rich text support with a custom WYSIWYG editor (a Markdown editor is on its way)
• Friendly URLs, post IDs and CouchDB document IDs with slugs
• A primitive admin area for adding and editing posts (go to '/admin' to take a look)
• New default front-end theme called "Soothe"