Flowershow: A Free & Open Source tool for publishing your Obsidian vaults

Hi, fellow Obsidian fans!

We’re letting you know about Flowershow :tulip: https://flowershow.app/.

Flowershow is a tool to help you publish your Obsidian notes. It’s free and open-source.

Whether it’s your knowledge garden, wiki, or blog, Flowershow’s aim is to help you share your work with the world, easily and beautifully!

:construction: Note: we’re still putting the finishing touches to Flowershow before putting it on open release. Sign up on the site if you’d like to try it out. :construction:

:arrow_right: Check out Flowershow site - it’s built with Flowershow!
:arrow_right: And find us on Github

Flowershow is

  • Built for Markdown and crafted for Obisidian: Works with your existing Obsidian notes out of the box. No need to modify the syntax or change the file layout. Not an obsidian fan? Flowershow will work with any CommonMark or GFM markdown files.
  • Elegant and functional: Clean and elegant default theme with a dark and light mode, hero, navbar, backlinks section, and support for internal links, backlinks, math, mermaid, callouts, and more.
  • Customizable and extendable: Want to spice things up? Flowershow is easy to extend, tweak and customize and is built on a standard, modern web stack – React, NextJS and Tailwind.
  • Backed by an experienced team: We’ve been building content and data-driven products for over a decade, and we’re passionate about sharing knowledge and ideas with others. We love markdown as much as we love open-source (which is a lot!).

Why flowershow?

We’ve built content and data-driven websites for over a decade and we love Markdown. We’ve been using it a lot internally, both for note-taking and for content authoring for our various projects. But some time ago we discovered Obsidian. And we fell in love with it :heart_eyes:.

We thought it would be amazing to author our content completely this way and still be able to publish the result as elegant websites.

So, we started working on Flowershow - a tool that supports all the Obsidian goodness and its syntax (e.g. wikilinks, backlinks, Mermaid and Excalidraw embeds or knowledge graph) and would also be able to produce a beautiful, customizable, and maintainable website.

We also :heart: Open Source and want Flowershow to grow with the needs and contributions of the community.

Features (supported and en route)

  • :white_check_mark: CommonMark and GitHub Flavoured Markdown support
  • :white_check_mark: MDX support to allow for importing custom React components, using data in your markdown, and more
  • :white_check_mark: Elegant default theme to start with
  • :white_check_mark: Obsidian wiki-links
  • :white_check_mark: Customizable layouts of your pages
  • :white_check_mark: Tailwind support for easy styling in-markdown HTML and custom components
  • :white_check_mark: Google analytics and SEO support
  • :white_check_mark: Mermaid and MathJax support
  • :construction: Themes library (with light and dark themes)
  • :construction: Excalidraw support
  • :construction: Back-and forward links
  • :construction: Knowledge graph
  • :construction: CLI tool to make the publishing process a matter of a few commands

…and many more!


:building_construction: Alpha version Flowershow is being developed very actively but there is a lot more cool stuff coming. Check out the roadmap and issues on our GitHub repo to learn more!

:satellite: Stay tuned! Visit our website and leave us your email, if you’d like to get notified about our latest features!

:compass: We’d love to hear your opinions and sugestions! Maybe there is a feature you think we’ve completely overlooked or you have an idea for some cool addition? Let us know!

21 Likes

Hi, all!

Thank you so much for your interest in Flowershow!

Here are some of the new features we have implemented since the original post. Many more to come, so stay tuned! :sunglasses::rocket:

CLI tool

First version of the CLI tool, that helps you install the Flowershow template, as well as build, and preview your website.

Dark / light theme

Dark/light theme now supported – plus ability to “pin” the theme.

In-markdown table of contents

In-markdown table of contents automatically injected under “Table of contents” headings.

Headings wrapped in anchor tags

Headings wrapped in anchor tags with clickable icons shown on hover.

image

Full-text search

Support for full-text search with Algolia.

“Edit this page” button

Optional “Edit this page” button added at the bottom of the page if you keep your content in github repository and want to allow others to contribute to it.

Image embedding

Image embedding using transclusion syntax.

Smartypants support

Smartypants support to convert plain ASCII punctuation characters into “smart” typographic punctuation HTML entities.


If you have any ideas for new features or if you’ve noticed any bugs, please submit an issue here or start a discussion here. Thank you! :tulip:

5 Likes

Hey digital gardeners!

Thank you so much for your interest in Flowershow!

Here are some of the new features we have implemented. :sunglasses::rocket:

Right Hand Side (RHS) Table of Contents (ToC)

Flowershow supports adding a RHS ToC sidebar to your pages.

Local search with Kbar

As an alternative to Algolia search engine integration, Flowershow now supports local content search with Kbar.

Custom data getters

A new data frontmatter field allows you to create and access custom functions in your markdown, which you can use to fetch data from local JSON files, from external APIs or even from your content files themselves - and use them in your custom components!

Windows support

You can now use our Flowershow CLI to build your sites on Windows.

Video tutorial

We have created our first Flowershow tutorial! Check it out to learn how to create a basic Flowershow website with us. Stay tuned :radio:! More episodes to come!


We :blue_heart: feedback! If you have any ideas for new features or if you’ve noticed any bugs, please submit an issue here or start a discussion here. Thank you! :tulip:

Join our Discord server!

3 Likes

Flowershow looks very impressive.
You’ve done great job!

This is incredible! Just what I was looking for and can’t wait to take it for a spin.

i’ve started to play with Flowershow… it is really what i was looking for: a tailored NextJS/Taoilwind application for Obsidian vaults.

i already pay for Obsidian Publish, but i need a top horizontal and customizable menu, mdx components, a blog section… Publish can’t do them… and we don’t know it will ever do.

I also want to publish subsites (i have a “big” brain) and this solution is perfect.

looking forward to collaborate

Hey digital gardeners! :bouquet:

Why did the tomato turn red? Because it saw the salad dressing! :green_salad:

Here are some of the new features we have implemented. :sunglasses::rocket:

Theming with custom fonts and colors

With custom font and color functionality added, you can easily change the default look of your flowershow website from this:

To something like this:

Check out our theming tutorial:

Link Preview Tooltips

Flowershow supports showing tooltips with the page’s preview content when hovering over links to other documents within your site.

image

Authors added to blogs

You can check the newest tutorial on setting up a blog listing page with authors displaying on blog posts:

https://flowershow.app/docs/blog-section-tutorial

2 Likes

Look like the perfect tool. I have been looking all day the different options to publish using Obsidian notes, I was looking ideally for nextjs and wish I found flowershow earlier.

1 Like

Hey digital gardeners! :bouquet:

Why did the banana go to the doctor? :man_health_worker: Because it wasn’t peeling well! :banana:

Here are some of the new features we have implemented. :sunglasses::rocket:

Page comments

Flowershow supports the integration of Giscus, Utterances, or Disqus to add comments functionality to your website, allowing visitors to provide their feedback and thoughts on your content.

Site wide table of contents

Flowershow supports adding a site-wide table of contents in a LHS sidebar to allow your users to easily navigate to other pages on your website.

Twitter embeds

Inserting a twitter url in between new lines will automatically be converted into an embed


We :blue_heart: feedback! If you have any ideas for new features or if you’ve noticed any bugs, please submit an issue here or start a discussion here. Thank you! :tulip:

Join our Discord server!

2 Likes

I tried a few times, but couldn’t make it work. Finally, gave up after lengthy troubleshooting with the team. Decided to just continue with Publish.