librelist archives

Version 0.9.10 (with plugins!)

From:

Graham Ashton

Date:

2011-09-09 @ 17:59

Some of you will have noticed that whenever a new feature gets suggested 
(that isn't a no brainer for everybody's web site) I tend to say "that 
sounds great, but it ought to go in a plugin". You may also have noticed 
that there hasn't really been any plugin support.

Until now, that is. :-)

Plugins allow you to package up stuff that you'd normally do in your 
app.rb file and share them between your apps.

Here are the docs: http://nestacms.com/docs/plugins

I haven't made any plugins yet, so it may be a little rough around the 
edges. I thought it was better to put it out there and let people have a 
crack at it than sit on it until I get a chance to write a couple.

0.9.10 also includes the flags metadata that Nathanael suggested the other
week. There are docs for that too:

http://nestacms.com/docs/creating-content/metadata-reference#flags

For the full list of changes in 0.9.10, see the blog post:

http://nestacms.com/blog/version-0-9-10

Right, I'm off to the pub.

Another question—

Nesta is using Maruku for Markdown to HTML parsing.  On GitHub, it can be 
seen that the main branch of Maruku development hasn't been updated for 
more than a year now, while various people have been pursuing various bug 
fixes and  changes on other branches.

This wouldn't worry me too much otherwise, but I've just come across a 
glitch in the rendering of footnotes on pages stored in Markdown format, 
which is caused by Maruku.   The problem is described here:

	https://github.com/nex3/maruku/issues/18

—in the comments there, it can be seen that there is a simple fix that can
be implemented. But this fix has not been incorporated back into the main 
Maruku branch.

If I was more experienced, I'd know what to do now.  But I don't.  Should 
I be bugging Nathan Weizenbaum to put this into the main branch and issue 
a new release?  Something else?

All advice appreciated,

Brad.

On 11 Sep 2011, at 01:25, Brad Weslake wrote:

> Nesta is using Maruku for Markdown to HTML parsing. On GitHub, it can be
seen that the main branch of Maruku development hasn't been updated for 
more than a year now, while various people have been pursuing various bug 
fixes and  changes on other branches.

I think Nesta should probably be using a different Markdown processor, 
probably redcarpet.

There are a few features in Maruku that the other Markdown processors 
don't support. I've held off switching to redcarpet or RDiscount in the 
past because I didn't know how big an impact it would have on existing 
sites.

If you're relying on Maruku's extra features let me know. I'm planning on 
dropping Maruku support entirely, but if anybody needs it I could write a 
quick plugin for using Maruku.

Comments here, or on this ticket:

https://github.com/gma/nesta/pull/65

I'm just reading the tilt source. It looks like getting tilt to handle 
Markdown and Textile would allow everybody to override the default choice 
of Markdown processor in app.rb. Which would be nice.

On 11 Sep 2011, at 09:54, Graham Ashton wrote:

> Comments here, or on this ticket:
> 
> https://github.com/gma/nesta/pull/65
> 
> I'm just reading the tilt source. It looks like getting tilt to handle 
Markdown and Textile would allow everybody to override the default choice 
of Markdown processor in app.rb. Which would be nice.

Getting tilt to render the files inside content/pages was easy:

https://github.com/gma/nesta/commit/5e0f2af33f6ccb2886cb67c8d6bc18385773ef83

By default it'll use redcarpet, but you can stick with Maruku by adding 
the maruku gem to your Gemfile and adding this to your app.rb file:

    Tilt.prefer Tilt::MarukuTemplate

The same goes for the other Markdown processors supported by Tilt 
(BlueCloth, RDiscount and Kramdown).

Is this worth releasing in 0.9.11? I've no more plans to do a significant 
amount of work on Nesta for the rest of this week.

I don't want to spam you all with new releases, but then  I don't want to 
sit on useful patches for weeks either, and hacking on Nesta is going to 
have to take a back seat to working on something that will earn some cash 
before too long...

> Getting tilt to render the files inside content/pages was easy:

Excellent!  Thanks very much for this.

> Is this worth releasing in 0.9.11? I've no more plans to do a 
significant amount of work on Nesta for the rest of this week.

I think this is definitely worth releasing in 0.9.11.

In case others are interested in using the footnote syntax from PHP 
Markdown Extra, here is a summary of the different Markdown parsers with 
respect to this feature:

- BlueCloth: Unsupported, as best I can tell. 
- Kramdown: Supported. See: http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/syntax.html
- Maruku: Unsupported, though a fix is described here: 
https://github.com/nex3/maruku/issues/18
- RDiscount: Unsupported, though there is a pull request adding the 
feature here: https://github.com/rtomayko/rdiscount/pull/34
- Redcarpet: Unsupported

So, once Nesta comes with the new Tilt options, I'll be switching to 
Kramdown for the time being...

Cheers,

Brad.

Graham—

Allowing draft pages is a nice feature, thanks!

Here's another feature I'd love to see—sending trackbacks to linked sites.
Automatically doing it would be great, but—if it's easier—doing it via 
hand in the metadata would be good too.

Cheers,

Brad.
http://bweslake.org/

On Sep 9, 2011, at 1:59 PM, Graham Ashton wrote:

> Some of you will have noticed that whenever a new feature gets suggested
(that isn't a no brainer for everybody's web site) I tend to say "that 
sounds great, but it ought to go in a plugin". You may also have noticed 
that there hasn't really been any plugin support.
> 
> Until now, that is. :-)
> 
> Plugins allow you to package up stuff that you'd normally do in your 
app.rb file and share them between your apps.
> 
> Here are the docs: http://nestacms.com/docs/plugins
> 
> I haven't made any plugins yet, so it may be a little rough around the 
edges. I thought it was better to put it out there and let people have a 
crack at it than sit on it until I get a chance to write a couple.
> 
> 0.9.10 also includes the flags metadata that Nathanael suggested the 
other week. There are docs for that too:
> 
> http://nestacms.com/docs/creating-content/metadata-reference#flags
> 
> For the full list of changes in 0.9.10, see the blog post:
> 
> http://nestacms.com/blog/version-0-9-10
> 
> Right, I'm off to the pub.

On 9 Sep 2011, at 22:59, Brad Weslake wrote:

> Here's another feature I'd love to see—sending trackbacks to linked 
sites.  Automatically doing it would be great, but—if it's easier—doing it
via hand in the metadata would be good too.

Hi Brad. What would a trackback look like, and when would you want to add 
one? I've probably seen sites doing this, but I'm not making the 
connection. Can you think of any examples we could have a look at?

>> Here's another feature I'd love to see—sending trackbacks to linked 
sites.  Automatically doing it would be great, but—if it's easier—doing it
via hand in the metadata would be good too.
> 
> Hi Brad. What would a trackback look like, and when would you want to 
add one? I've probably seen sites doing this, but I'm not making the 
connection. Can you think of any examples we could have a look at?

Hi Graham,

Here's a description of trackbacks from Wordpress:

	http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#Trackbacks

Disqus includes trackback support out of the box, so anyone can send 
trackbacks to a Disqus-enabled Nesta site using the Disqus Trackback URL 
for the relevant page.  What I am after is a method to send trackbacks 
*from* Nesta to other blogs that support trackbacks.  Let me know if I 
need to elaborate further...

Cheers,

Brad.

On 11 Sep 2011, at 00:08, Brad Weslake wrote:

> What I am after is a method to send trackbacks *from* Nesta to other 
blogs that support trackbacks.

As I understand it, sending a trackback should occur when you publish a 
post. Nesta has no idea when publishing happens (it's not really an event 
that Nesta is aware of), so I can't see a way to include it in Nesta 
itself. You could run a script to send the trackback for you though.

I found this (though there are probably more recent ones out there):

http://postneo.com/2003/01/31/tblib-command-line-client

Or is there a better way?

> As I understand it, sending a trackback should occur when you publish a 
post. Nesta has no idea when publishing happens (it's not really an event 
that Nesta is aware of), so I can't see a way to include it in Nesta 
itself.

Yes, publishing should be the point at which the trackback is sent, so the
Nesta model looks like it isn't well suited to this.

> You could run a script to send the trackback for you though.  I found 
this (though there are probably more recent ones out there):
> 
> http://postneo.com/2003/01/31/tblib-command-line-client

Thanks!  This looks just the thing.

> Or is there a better way?

Not that I know of—if anyone else here has ideas, I'd be interested to hear them.

Cheers,

Brad.