Parking for Pennies (or less) — Part 2

Creating Site Flows

Brian Winkers
4 min readJul 8, 2022

Use the hosted editor to open the cloned project’s app/public/tcms directory.The create one or more flows, each representing the single-page content for a parked domain. You need to reference the flow’s ID so we need to start by creating the flows. It isn’t important to have all the content at this point, a simple header will let you know the page is loading correctly.

Loading the multi-host content directory

Select the app/public/tcms directory

You should see one existing flow for Localhost.

Default flow in TachyonCMS

Add a Flow

You can access the New Flow form by Clicking Add Flow at the top of the Flows list or from the left drawer. The “Open Flow” checkbox will cause the app to automatically switch to the new flow.

The New Flow Form is available from the flow list or drawer
Screenshot of for to add new TachyonCMS flow.
Enter the info for a new flow, only the title will be visible by the public.

Add a Nugget to the Flow

Each flow can support any number of sequenced nuggets. A nugget can be either an Editor.js nugget or a Media nugget.

Choose either nugget type, the can be intermixed in a single flow.

Add a Block to the Nugget

Define the block data

Enter the block info and click Save

Adding Additional Flows, Nuggets and Blocks

You can add as many flows, nuggets to a flow, and blocks to a nuggets as you desire.

Editor.js and Media nuggets can be intermixed, but the block types are specific to each.

TachyonCMS supports an unlimited number of flows.

Configure Site Hostnames

Use the hosted editor to open the cloned project’s webapp/src/tcms-config directory. There will be an existing flow with a single hostname and site configure. That can be used as a model for supporting additional hostnames. You will need the flow IDs from the previous step.

Open the app/src/tcms-config directory with the hosted editor.
There is a predefined configuration flow

That configuration defines the host and flow that appears when you run the Multi-Site App locally.

The hostname localhost is assigned to the dev site.
The dev site is assigned F62d_Y4Ip_kzXF_y4u1_JgUB as a flowId.

Add the hostnames and sites you want to support. Adding the entry for the Open Source Bike flow created above looks like this:

{
"defaultHost": "",
"hostSites": {
"localhost": "dev",
"www.opensourcebike.com": "osb"
},
"siteFlows": {
"dev": "F62d_Y4Ip_kzXF_y4u1_JgUB",
"osb": "E3Et_9HjG_kVyq_S9aJ_1qNd"
}
}

The hostname www.opensourcebike.com is assigned to the osb site.
The osb site is assigned E3Et_9HjG_kVyq_S9aJ_1qNd as a flowId.

You can map as many hostname and sites as needed. Multiple hostnames can map to one site. Make sure to save changes in the JSON editor before closing.

You can define as many host to site flow mappings as needed.

Additional Parts of this Article

Medium was having problems with a large story so I had to break it up.
Part 1 — OverviewPart
Part 2 — Creating Site Flows
Part 3 — Publishing to a CDN with GitHub and Netlify
Part 4 — DNS Configuration

Previous Articles in the Series

Part 1 — Parking for Pennies
Part 2 — AWS SSL Certificates
Part 3 — Mass Hosting Paradigm
Part 4 — Not Content with Contentful
Part 5 — Introducing TachyonCMS
Part 6 — Parking for Pennies (or less) — Part 1

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Brian Winkers

35 years building the most cutting edge sites on the Internet