Just some bug fixes with view caching and image handling; in particular, remote and static images will now respect max_width and max_height for the sizing, and I fixed the way that inline images work (insofar as now inline images can work).
This entry marks the release of Publ v0.3.9. It has the following changes:
Added more_text and related functionality to image sets (an example being visible over here)
Improved and simplified the caching behavior (fixing some fiddly cases around how ETags and last-modified worked, or rather didn’t)
I also made, and then soon reverted, a change around how entry IDs and publish dates were automatically assigned to non-published entries. I thought it was going to simplify some workflow things but it only complicated the code and added more corner cases to deal with, all for something that doesn’t actually address the use case I was worried about. So never mind on that.
(What happened to v0.3.8? I goofed and forgot to merge the completed more_text et al changes into my build system first. Oops.)
I just released v0.3.6 of Publ, which just allows it to work with databases other than SQLite. In particular this is part of testing more advanced heroku deployment options.
Right now I’m primarily focusing on improving the documentation, especially the quickstart guide, since people are finally showing interest in Publ but aren’t quite sure where to begin!
I’ve also updated the sample site templates with all of the changes that have happened since, uh, June, and also included some sample content so it’s easier to get started with it.
I’ve started working on Pushl in earnest now, and one thing that was really bugging me about this is that anything which polls feeds and entries would really benefit from having client-side cache control working. Which was a big missing feature in Publ.
The short version: for any given view it figures out (pessimistically) what’s the most recent file that would have affected the view (well, within reason; it only looks at the current template rather than any included templates, which is pretty difficult to do correctly) and uses that to generate an ETag (via metadata fingerprint) and a Last-Modified time (based either on the file modification time or the time the entry was actually published).
There’s probably a few corner cases this misses but in general this makes client-side caching of feeds and such work nicely.
I found a few more annoying bugs that were shaken out from the whole PonyORM transition, as well as a couple of bugs in the new shape functionality. There’s probably a few more of these bugs lurking in the codebase (I mean, in addition to the existing bugs I know about), but here’s what’s changed:
Image shape bugs:
Fix some FileNotFound handling on images (so shape errors propagate correctly)
Make img_class and class work correctly per the documentation
Did you know that CSS3 has a style called shape-outline? It’s pretty neat, it makes it so that a floated object gets a shape based on the alpha channel of its specified image. But it’s kind of a pain to set up; in plain HTML it looks something like this:
and if you want a different shape mask for your image than its own alpha channel, you have to do a bunch of stuff like making sure that the image sizes are the same and whatever.
Version 0.3.0 is now released, with the change from peewee to PonyORM.
As a result of this change you’ll have to do two things to your config file:
The database configuration format has changed slightly
Any existing databases have to be manually deleted/dropped/etc.; unfortunately PonyORM doesn’t provide a mechanism for deleting tables not under its control
Everything else should work identically as before.
Earlier today I pushed v0.2.2, which was a minor configuration fix for the markdown library to support table syntax.
Then I pushed v0.2.2.1 which was another configuration fix to fix that fix (oops).
Then in deploying updates I upgraded to Python 3.7, and promptly discovered that Publ doesn’t actually work on Python 3.7, so just now I fixed that, and released the fixes as v0.2.3.
Updated code to use the current Flask cache-control API
Only set cache-control for responses that don’t have a natural cache response
Entry IDs and UUIDs are now semi-stably generated, in order to prevent (or at least reduce) problems like the last time
Publ itself is stable enough (and enough has changed since v0.1.0) that I felt that a minor version bump was a reasonable thing to do.
Anyway! While Publ has been running quite nicely on my website, I’d love to see more people actively using and developing it. This site in particular needs a lot of attention and probably reworking; my other top priorities are:
A better installation/deployment guide
Proper test coverage (rather than manual smoke tests)
The image rendition cache now gets periodically purged; the default is to delete renditions which haven’t been used in the last week (this can be disabled)
Bug fixes:
entry.title can now accept the no_smartquotes parameter, which is necessary in Atom feeds
entry.card now uses the same Markdown extensions as entry.body
I neglected to mention that I set Publ to beta status in v0.1.22, which was a minor bugfix release, rather than moving to 0.2 like I previously stated. The changes for 0.1.22 were:
Fixes to category Sort-Name
Added support for regex path-alias hooks (this is configured on the Python/WSGI side, and has been working quite nicely over on beesbuzz.biz)
Fixed a dumb bug in the cache-control headers
And then the changes for 0.1.23:
Enable automatic smart-quote substitutions (this is the default setting, and can be overridden by passing no_smartquotes=True to entry.body/entry.more/entry.title)
Improve the handling of last-modified times on entries (now there’s a Last-Modified header which only gets set when you want it to be)
The amount of stuff I’m having to fix in Publ to support beesbuzz.biz is diminishing rapidly! Here’s what’s happened since 0.1.18:
Improved the Path-Alias redirection logic; now it will do a 301 Permanently Moved for inbound Path-Aliased requests, and if a Path-Alias points to an entry with a Redirect-To it will redirect directly to that URL instead (and it will be a 302, same as the old Redirect-To behavior)
Pagination can now be weekly; you can use entry.archive(paging='week'), and a ?date= view parameter ending in _w will provide a weekly view instead.
Better default formatting for view.range, and an addition of a week format parameter there
So aside from the Dreamhost issues, I would like to share what’s new in the latest version as part of my big “get my website online” push:
PERFORMANCE: Improved the threading mechanisms around image renditions for better stability and performance
BUGFIX: Made markup tagging work consistently between image types
FEATURE: view.link() now allows overriding category
FEATURE: You can now mark an entry with an Entry-Status of DELETED or GONE, which results in a 410 error instead of a 404 (be the envy of your web-developer nerd friends!)
FEATURE: Error templates will automatically use the x00 error code as a potential fallback (e.g. error code 503 will also fall back to a template for 500)
FEATURE: Entry titles can now have Markdown in them, and it usually works most of the time!
BUGFIX: Now when running in debug mode you don’t end up with two watchdog threads
FEATURE/QUALITY: Refactored the way error pages are handled, and now if you get a 404-type error on a page while the index is being asynchronously scanned, it’ll turn into a 503 with a Retry-After disposition in case it’s just something that hasn’t been indexed yet
UX: View pagination URLs now all use id as the query parameter rather than a miasma of contextually-dependent start, last, or first which made no sense anyway
Oh, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted an update, hasn’t it? That’s
because I’ve been very busy building the templates for my personal site! In
doing so I’ve greatly improved the way that view refinements worked, fixed a few
silly bugs with image search paths on templates, and also added an easier way to
specify background images in CSS, via the image().get_css_background() method.
I’m really excited to be able to bring my first fully-realized Publ site to the
public; I hope it gets other people interested in what a flexible publishing
system allows them to do!
These things are already making my new personal site look way better and easier
to use! I feel like I’m almost ready to flip the switch.
Oh, and I also improved the getting started guide, including
adding basic setup instructions for Linux and Windows. Not that I’ve gotten Publ
to run on Windows, yet, but documenting how to get the environment set up is
the first step, right?
Today I got two major bits of functionality in: Publ will now asynchronously scan the content index (which speeds up startup and fixes some annoying race conditions with entry creation), and it also asynchronously generates image renditions (which makes pages not take forever to load on first render, and will also use multiple CPU cores if available). Seems to work well so far.
I was running into scaling problems with beesbuzz.biz (what with there being a couple thousand entries and some pages with hundreds of images on it) and this keeps it feeling pretty good.
Rewrote the pagination logic to actually work across category-recursive views, and to support pagination where the
sort order isn’t necessarily the same between renders
Refactored images so that the template image() function has access to the tag writer
These changes were made as part of migrating beesbuzz.biz over to Publ, which I’ve made a lot of progress on now.
It’s pretty nice getting my overall design proven out, and to shake out all the little bugs and misfeatures.
Hopefully soon I’ll have Publ in a state where I feel comfortable releasing it as beta.
I just released v0.1.12 which adds a couple of quick, minor-ish fixes to Unicode handling; in particular:
UTF-8-containing headers no longer get MIME-mangled on first import
I finally made the automatic slug text way better by switching to awesome-slugify
So, now it’s no longer US-English-centric, at least. Right now it just uses the defaults; at some point I’ll want to make it so that you can configure a site’s or entry’s language locale so that things work better on that end too.
I have now implemented the basic OpenGraph API to Publ, so now a template can generate an OpenGraph card with entry.card.
So in theory when this entry gets autoposted to Twitter, this first paragraph should appear, as should the below image:
Anyway that’s what’s new in v0.1.11 (as well as a bunch of internal refactoring to support this addition).
If you are reading this, it means that Publ v0.1.10 is out. This release is mostly about a few cleanups, such as:
No longer nests a <div> for an image gallery inside of a containing <p> (which both fixes an HTML validation error and makes styling more controllable)
Cleans up error handling somewhat
Also cleans up a bunch of code for property caching
But there’s also a new feature, namely view.range, which you can read about over in the API docs.
I am also making significant progress in porting my main website over to Publ and hopefully I’ll
have something to show for it soon. (And I promise it looks way nicer than this site!)
