Publ 0.4.6, Authl 0.1.5

Updated some packages.

Main things with Publ since the last release:

• Internal cleanups to how caching happens
• Stop spuriously-caching a bunch of stuff; in particular login/logout endpoint URLs no longer get cached
• Various cleanups
• Improve the way that built-in templates are managed
• Initial cruddy implementation of an admin authentication dashboard (although this isn’t quite ready for prime time)

The only Authl change is that email identities are now given as a full mailto: URL; going forward all identity strings will be full URLs. This simplifies the UX for admin dashboards, in particular, and removes some ambiguity.

v0.4.0 released! Let’s talk future!

Oh wow, I finally closed out the Publ 0.4.0 milestone. So, wow, this is a pretty big deal for me.

Changes since 0.3.23:

• Fixed a bug with absolute paths in asset links
• Added a default error handler if there’s no global error template configured
• Finally added the ability to configure the Markdown processor, both at the global and per-template level

So that closes out the last three issues before I was ready to consider this usable by a wider audience. Neat.

There’s a lot of stuff I want to do for 1.0 of course, but also more importantly I need to vastly improve the documentation on this site, as well as collect things to make it easier for people to get started with Publ. I would absolutely invite people to make suggestions; have you looked into Publ, and been confused about what exactly to do? Please let me know!

The best ways to do so are to either hop onto my Discord channel or to open issues against the documentation site.

v0.3.19, now with extra tagging goodness!

I’ve released Publ v0.3.19, which now finally has a tagging system, which is only one of the oldest issues that was still open.

Here’s a list of what’s been added or changed since 0.3.18:

• The test site is now part of the Publ repository itself (as mentioned previously)
• Added crop and fullsize_crop to image renditions (although I’ve already decided the format should be different after using this for a day)
• Made Path-Alias less annoying
• Fixed an issue with unpaged archive links getting filtered
• Prune missing files from the index

Credits

I want to thank Karina Antonio for implementing image cropping.

v0.3.18, now with better asset management!

I’ve just released v0.3.18, with the following changes:

• Add date grouping properties to entry
• Add a pages property to view
• Provide the current category object to the error handler
• Support linking to non-image/non-entry local files
• Added, then removed, some performance micro-optimizations that only caused problems

More details about the major changes below!

Update: I released a hotfix as 0.3.18.1 because there was a last-minute bug that snuck in while I was trying to silence a new pylint error. Oops.

An early-alpha Movable Type importer

For those folks who want to import their content from Movable Type over to Publ, I’ve finally gotten around to writing an importer. Currently it only attempts to convert entry content and category metadata, and only using SQLite-formatted database dumps.

See its README.md for the (incredibly rough) usage instructions.

Eventually I want to try to automatically convert templates from MT’s scripting language to Jinja-Publ templates, although there’s a bunch of stuff that’s going to be difficult to port across and a lot of stuff is just plain not feasible to even try, so don’t expect that to become a major thing any time soon.

v0.3.11

v0.3.11 is now released, with the following changes:

• A more complete fix for how to handle image sets and inline images with respect to paragraphs
• Better cleanup for spurious empty paragraphs
• Improved internal entry link handling

Detailed descriptions of the changes are below.

Some thoughts on WebMention

So, for the last couple of days I’ve been playing with some of the IndieWeb concepts, in particular Webmention. Spurred on by a helpful thread with Kevin Marks, I took some time to actually do a rough implementation of outgoing Webmentions, and also did some of the work to set up the h-card and h-entry microformats on my main site.

As far as I can tell, it works great, but I’m also not going to actually merge this to master or push it to production. Read on to see why!

v0.1.19: creeping ever closer to beta status

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 much for Dreamhost

One of the overarching reasons I decided to build Publ the way I did was in order to take advantage of Dreamhost’s support for Passenger WSGI. I was expecting that to be the primary means of hosting my main site (which is way too big for a Heroku instance) and given how smoothly things were working with this site on Dreamhost I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal.

However, there was a huge monkey wrench thrown into things when I switched my site’s configuration over to Passenger; despite all of my configuration being exactly the same between publ.beesbuzz.biz and beesbuzz.biz, the rendition cache on beesbuzz.biz was getting its permissions set wrong, and there was some rather weird behavior with how it was making the temporary files to begin with.

In investigating this I attempted to upgrade my packages on publ.beesbuzz.biz, and all h*ck broke loose.