Post API: formats & new plaintext field

In certain cases, we need to have a plain text version of a post. This means adding a new field to the DB of plaintext and converting the HTML on save.

As an additional consideration, we added the amp field (which does much the same thing) without really thinking about the additional overhead to the API - the AMP html is only useful in the case that we are rendering AMP. Equally, only the editor will need the mobiledoc content, and a blog really only needs HTML.

This leads to the idea of adding a ?formats=html,plaintext parameter to the API. The default would be html, but html, amp, mobiledoc & plaintext would all be available.

The tasks are as follows:

Required for beta:

• Add a new plaintext field to the posts table
• Remove the markdown field? see #8479
• Auto-fill plaintext with a full plaintext version of the post on save
• Add ?formats to the API & return just html by default
• editor requests mobiledoc/plaintext
• rename amp field to comment_id (tracked here https://github.com/TryGhost/Team/issues/42)

Post-beta improvements

• Auto-fill amp on save as well! (This is not done yet!)
• Update the amp code to request AMP specifically

[ErisDS]

@kirrg001 FYI I agree, let’s rename the amp field and then close this. We can think about optimising amp later if needed.

[kirrg001]

rename amp field to comment_id

This is tracked in https://github.com/TryGhost/Team/issues/42.

If we now rename the amp column to comment_id, the field would be always empty except you did an import of content to remember the old comment id. This is because the comment_id is always the post id. That is somehow weird and not really clean.

A thought. If we would import post including the ID field, we don’t need to remember the old comment_id anymore. Object ID’s are time and random based, i guess it’s okay to import posts including the ID field. The only edge case i can think of, is importing a post twice with the same ID, but this post would get ignored.

This is just a thought or let’s say, an easier and different approach. That’s why i would like to tackle this in the next major and give this topic a little more attention.

Right now if you have AMP enabled and you request the AMP format via the API, you would receive nothing. This is definitely a bug. That means, the AMP generation has to be triggered

Let’s wait till it get’s raised as a bug. Not critical in my opinion.

Closing.