Customization Hacks on the BookStack Site
Dan Brown posted on the 15th of February 2023
Over the last few years BookStack has gained a few different methods that can be used to customize functionally and aesthetics. Quite often, for ideas that don’t quite fit for quick implementation within the core BookStack codebase, I’d provide a simplistic customization that can used to achieve that idea right now, using BookStack’s methods of hackery. These were scattered around GitHub issues, GitHub gists and discord messages, which required me to also provide implementation guidance each time. To organize and streamline the process of sharing these, there’s now a dedicated section on the BookStack site:
Each hack is shown in a relatively standardized format, and implementation instructions are centralized & linked to from each file listed for the hack. Each hack also shows some details such as the creator and the last version of BookStack it was tested against.
I have to stress, these hacks are unsupported and are not assured to be updated or work with future BookStack versions. There are usually reasons these are not implemented as core features already, and I cannot afford to widen the scope of the support already provided for the core platform/code.
While part of the site, hacks are managed via a separate repo here. Contributions are welcome but the scope of those is relatively strict to keep maintenance reasonable so please read the readme first.
This new area may evolve over time. I’ve set this up to potentially work with code-driven systems in the future, with the idea of being able to easily add these to BookStack via a single command, or something similar. I’m also toying with the idea of monetizing these via some kind of hack build/update service offering. But for now, I’m just looking to build up this collection over time and gain an idea of whether this is useful while assessing its project maintenance impact.
Header Image Credits: Photo by Yves Alarie on Unsplash