What is Zeropress?
Zeropress is a high feature, high security, high performance, minimalist knowledgebase system that supports full WYSIWYG editing and has powerful yet easy categorization. it's designed for both ease of viewing and ease of use.
The navigation menu on the left works exactly like a file explorer ( drag and drop, right click ), and the editing on the right works almost exactly like a scaled down version of Microsoft Word. In our experience, an average computer user can understand how to use it in less than 5 minutes.
What's ZP's mission at ES?
A knowledgebase is the most requested feature for the last decade since the technical demise of our wikimedia knowledgebase system in 2015.
We think that adding a knowledgebase back to ES would improve the utility of the forum significantly, helping rapidly educate new users, who are typically overwhelmed by the sheer amount of posts early in their ES journey.
Our goal is to have the best ebike knowledgebase on the whole internet, written and maintained by our most experienced members ( we are lucky to have a lot of big brains on ES! )
We did an evaluation of all knowledgebase software in 2020 for ES and came up empty handed again. We decided ZP would be the best software for Endless Sphere, because it already has some of the features ES needs, and it would be easier to build ES-specific features for; particularly a seamless integration which maintains the look and feel of the forum software and doesn't operate as a different site.
After exhausting other options, we determined it would be more cost effective to complete this software for ES' purposes than to bring existing software up to it's level.
Why did I build it?
In 2017, I looked at all the knowledgebase software available; all of it had poor categorization functionality, relied on code input instead of WYSIWYG, and was generally clunky. It wasn't end-user accessible, so that was a huge problem. After a decade of building websites with Wordpress tools, as well as systems in PHP, we thought, why isn't there a knowledgebase system that's as easy to use as Wordpress? Why can't we build that?
I built the first version in 2018, and gave it away for free to two companies, who still use it for their company knowledgebase today.
I started an IT company in 2020 and needed a knowledgebase system, so we adopted and gradually improved ZP from 2020-today.
What's it's future?
Zeropress is currently a closed-source ( because it's not polished enough ) system with 23 people using it. It gets great reviews from it's users, which has encouraged me to continue improving it.
The long term vision for Zeropress is for it to become an open source, easily self hostable mini-wikipedia, but also have a blog mode, so that it can be used in leiu of Wordpress for simple blogs. Long term, we aim to become the dominant software for small to medium sized knowledgebases and minimalistic blogs.
This funding round will tick off 75% of the work needed to make a self hostable, open source version.
How can i try it?
Visit https://endless-sphere.com/zp/
The username/password in the browser is:
User: zeropress
Pass: demo
Feel free to re-arrange things, make new articles, etc. The demo is reset to a default database every 3 hours.
Why am i asking for funding?
Software with a large amount of functionality and ease of use is difficult and expensive to build. My company has $12,000 of developer labor into the project over the years, and that was cheap, because 80% of the code ZP uses is either open source ( DD.js ) or purchased ( Jodit WYSIWYG editor ). Building it completely from scratch would have taken 2-3x longer.
We need an additional $7000 to build an ES integration and features ES needs, as well as add final polish.
Grin technologies agreed to match the donations from ES members, which means we need to raise $3500 of donations from ES users.
What is missing that we want to build:
- Fix various small bugs
- Rework UI to be more content focused ( less borders, more like Notion ), current look is dated
- Seamless integration into the ES forum, no separate login needed, same aesthetic.
- Fix bugs in categories drag and drop; indication of drag and drop targets is imperfect.
- Rework WYSIWYG editor toolbar to look better.
- Ability to drag and drop images into articles. ( copy/paste currently works )
- Commenting and article rating.
- Add an edit history that shows who edited what, and when, like wikipedia.
- Add modified by date and sort by modified date.
- Add path routing like wordpress, IE /?articleID=2134 becomes /upgrading-batteries
- Finish bandwidth/performance optimization ( massive room to improve here )
- Finish mobile mode ( currently janky )
How funding works:
Because we want to avoid doing impartial funding ( we would have to refund a lot of money if we don't hit the target ), here's our process:
- We take pledges in this thread and see if we can add up $4400 ( we're assuming ~10% of the pledges fall through )
- If we get enough pledges, we take donations to a paypal account. Once we hit the maximum pledge amount, we start building!
How do i pledge?
Simply reply with "I pledge $100" or whatever amount you're able to.
How do i donate?
Visit our funding page at ko-fi. You can donate with a credit card, paypal, or venmo.
https://ko-fi.com/es_kb_fundraiser
What if i have questions?
Feel free to ask them in the thread! I'll sort out the mess between pledges and questions.
Zeropress is a high feature, high security, high performance, minimalist knowledgebase system that supports full WYSIWYG editing and has powerful yet easy categorization. it's designed for both ease of viewing and ease of use.
The navigation menu on the left works exactly like a file explorer ( drag and drop, right click ), and the editing on the right works almost exactly like a scaled down version of Microsoft Word. In our experience, an average computer user can understand how to use it in less than 5 minutes.
 Zeropress viewing screen |  Zeropress editing screen |
What's ZP's mission at ES?
A knowledgebase is the most requested feature for the last decade since the technical demise of our wikimedia knowledgebase system in 2015.
We think that adding a knowledgebase back to ES would improve the utility of the forum significantly, helping rapidly educate new users, who are typically overwhelmed by the sheer amount of posts early in their ES journey.
Our goal is to have the best ebike knowledgebase on the whole internet, written and maintained by our most experienced members ( we are lucky to have a lot of big brains on ES! )
We did an evaluation of all knowledgebase software in 2020 for ES and came up empty handed again. We decided ZP would be the best software for Endless Sphere, because it already has some of the features ES needs, and it would be easier to build ES-specific features for; particularly a seamless integration which maintains the look and feel of the forum software and doesn't operate as a different site.
After exhausting other options, we determined it would be more cost effective to complete this software for ES' purposes than to bring existing software up to it's level.
Why did I build it?
In 2017, I looked at all the knowledgebase software available; all of it had poor categorization functionality, relied on code input instead of WYSIWYG, and was generally clunky. It wasn't end-user accessible, so that was a huge problem. After a decade of building websites with Wordpress tools, as well as systems in PHP, we thought, why isn't there a knowledgebase system that's as easy to use as Wordpress? Why can't we build that?
I built the first version in 2018, and gave it away for free to two companies, who still use it for their company knowledgebase today.
I started an IT company in 2020 and needed a knowledgebase system, so we adopted and gradually improved ZP from 2020-today.
What's it's future?
Zeropress is currently a closed-source ( because it's not polished enough ) system with 23 people using it. It gets great reviews from it's users, which has encouraged me to continue improving it.
The long term vision for Zeropress is for it to become an open source, easily self hostable mini-wikipedia, but also have a blog mode, so that it can be used in leiu of Wordpress for simple blogs. Long term, we aim to become the dominant software for small to medium sized knowledgebases and minimalistic blogs.
This funding round will tick off 75% of the work needed to make a self hostable, open source version.
How can i try it?
Visit https://endless-sphere.com/zp/
The username/password in the browser is:
User: zeropress
Pass: demo
Feel free to re-arrange things, make new articles, etc. The demo is reset to a default database every 3 hours.
Why am i asking for funding?
Software with a large amount of functionality and ease of use is difficult and expensive to build. My company has $12,000 of developer labor into the project over the years, and that was cheap, because 80% of the code ZP uses is either open source ( DD.js ) or purchased ( Jodit WYSIWYG editor ). Building it completely from scratch would have taken 2-3x longer.
We need an additional $7000 to build an ES integration and features ES needs, as well as add final polish.
Grin technologies agreed to match the donations from ES members, which means we need to raise $3500 of donations from ES users.
What is missing that we want to build:
- Fix various small bugs
- Rework UI to be more content focused ( less borders, more like Notion ), current look is dated
- Seamless integration into the ES forum, no separate login needed, same aesthetic.
- Fix bugs in categories drag and drop; indication of drag and drop targets is imperfect.
- Rework WYSIWYG editor toolbar to look better.
- Ability to drag and drop images into articles. ( copy/paste currently works )
- Commenting and article rating.
- Add an edit history that shows who edited what, and when, like wikipedia.
- Add modified by date and sort by modified date.
- Add path routing like wordpress, IE /?articleID=2134 becomes /upgrading-batteries
- Finish bandwidth/performance optimization ( massive room to improve here )
- Finish mobile mode ( currently janky )
- We take pledges in this thread and see if we can add up $4400 ( we're assuming ~10% of the pledges fall through )
- If we get enough pledges, we take donations to a paypal account. Once we hit the maximum pledge amount, we start building!
How do i pledge?
Simply reply with "I pledge $100" or whatever amount you're able to.
How do i donate?
Visit our funding page at ko-fi. You can donate with a credit card, paypal, or venmo.
https://ko-fi.com/es_kb_fundraiser
What if i have questions?
Feel free to ask them in the thread! I'll sort out the mess between pledges and questions.
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