What is planned next?
Priority 1
- Export functionality – Create an import-export functionality for all cns post types.
- General design overall (Editor) – Current design is pretty bootstrap, some design improvements are needed for better usability. I don’t intend to do much about the frontend design. That is up to the user. I will however provide a guide on how to overwrite css classes to better suite your needs.
Priority 2
- Map and Story timeline
- Enable a timeline option for maps to change over timeline steps
- Animated movement of e.g. characters over the time steps
Known issues/tickets/feature requests (last update 2026/10/16)
Storybuilder
- Substory nodes can only be substory post types. Enable other post types to link to story nodes
- Copy stories
Mapbuilder
- Copy maps
Wiki
- Make Infobox Read more Link editable
Development road up till here
How did we end up with Clouds and Spaceships as a WordPress plugin?
| Timeline | Stage | Github |
|---|---|---|
| 2026/06 – 2026/10 | Unifying all parts in the current WordPress Plugin | https://github.com/Marian-L-M/clouds-and-spaceships-wp-plugin |
| 2026/01 – 2026/06 | CNS Theme development CNS WordPress Trinity Port ( vibed using Claude) | Theme: https://github.com/Marian-L-M/clouds-and-spaceships Maps: https://github.com/Marian-L-M/cns-map-suite Wikis: https://github.com/Marian-L-M/cns-wiki-suite Stories: https://github.com/Marian-L-M/cns-story-suite |
| 2024/06 – 2026/01 | CNS First attempt at a full scale service app Next/Prisma/PostgreSQL. The idea was to create a low code application, that even non-technically minded people could deploy by forking the Github repo and deploying it with Vercel and Neon. | https://github.com/Marian-L-M/cns-app |
| 2023/02 – 2024/03 | CNS PoC Raw HTML/CSS/JS dummy | https://github.com/Marian-L-M/CNS-demo |
Findings
I came two major conclusions in my development process. With the premise that CNS should be a software that is accessible to all writers, even with minimal technical knowledge, setting up a Next.js is simply to complicated. Even with the help of AI, it became evident to me that it simply was not reasonable for a non-technical minded person to: Fork a github repo, link it to vercel, link it to neon, setup environment variables + pull updates on github and rebuild on Vercel, everytime there is an issue e.g. with Next or the CNS system itself.
From a developers perspective, I have also spent 20% of my time building the map and wiki functionality I wanted and 80% of my time reinventing the wheel e.g. simple user functionality and editor functionality. Thus I abandoned the Next.JS project in favor of WordPress – still abandoning a 1.5 year long project with 484 commits was really painful.
My saving grace was that around late 2025/early 2026 agentic AI coding tools really started to become more reliable and performant. So using the schematics and code from the Next.JS version and some of my previously created private WordPress plugins, creating a WordPress CNS version was a much less arduous task than it would have been 1-2 years prior. Painful to admit, but the code quality is also better than what I alone would have beeen able to achieve.
The original WordPress port envisioned a theme, to recreate the Map centric Wiki optics of the original CNS, and the functionality of CNS split into three plugin suites: Wiki, Maps, Story. Which were to be used as needed. I come from a WordPress Agency background where we build a lot of custom WordPress Themes, however the CNS Theme was my first attempt at creating a full fledged market ready theme. I once again came to the realization that I am just re-inventing the wheel – but worse – again. All the design I wanted to achieve could be done easier and better with standard Guttenberg tools. Submitting a theme and three plugins at once to WordPress also seemed like a herculean task for a first timer, so out with the theme and unifying the plugins is what I went with.