New release candidate, a warmup, and more

[Pakyow]

Things have been quiet around here lately, but we finally have significant progress to share.

Release Candidate

A new 0.8 release candidate was released yesterday that builds on the features we introduced in the initial release candidate. In the time between release candidates there have been over 180 commits that include a major refactor of core/presenter. Here are the major changes:

• A completely redesigned presentation layer. There are now explicit concepts of template, pages, and includes. Composition is based on inline comments rather than a `data-container` attribute. We think this greatly simplifies creating and managing an application's views.
• Greatly simplified aspects of the back-end code. A lot of work has happened around making the back-end code more clear. This includes a new app definition syntax, redesigned helper methods, and many other subtleties.
• Better default views for 404/500 messages. They now provide more information to the developer on what went wrong and suggest next steps to take.
• Updates to generated application, including bundler, pakyow-css, and additional default environments.
• Brand new logger that includes log levels, colors, etc.
• 0.8 is now thread safe.

If it isn't already obvious, the work the last few months has been centered around making 0.8 super easy to use. We're really happy with the result.

New Site + Warmup

The website for pakyow.com has been completely redesigned. See it here: http://new.pakyow.com/

Along with the redesign we've created a Warmup. The Warmup that will take you all the way through building a Pakyow application, from initial concepts to deploying it on Heroku. If you're interested in seeing what's changed in 0.8, the Warmup is where you want to start. We'd love your feedback.

http://new.pakyow.com/warmup

Documentation

The updated documentation is 80% complete. In the next week or two we will roll out what documentation we have with placeholders where documentation is still needed. Missing bits are low-priority and will be taken care of over time.

0.8 Final

There's a short list of things to take care of before the final release:

• Handle all yaml front-matter defined in pages, including automatically setting the page title.
• Add the ability to include partial views in a template.
• Automatically generate plaintext version of mail from the bounded HTML version.
• Finish pakyow-rake, which includes tasks for investigating routes, view composition, and data binding.

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Please post any questions or comments here. Thanks for your time!

Bryan P.

[Chad Taylor]

I really like the warmup!  Binders have been a fuzzy concept to me for a long time, but I finally understand where they fit after seeing them in action.

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[Chris Hansen]

I generally like the warmup, but I the concepts that are introduced, and then not expanded upon are confusing.  For example, the warmup states: "The page tells Pakyow which template to use. If a template isn't specified, Pakyow uses the default template named pakyow.html."  How does the page tell Pakyow which template to use?  I've been experimenting with different things, but without luck.  Perhaps my difficulties are just because I'm new to Ruby, but...  Thanks!

[Bryan Powell]

Sorry, Chris. I just saw this.

You can specify a template by adding YAML front-matter to a page:

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template: foo

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The plan is for the warmup to link to the related documentation that discusses these things in-depth.

Bryan P.

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[Chris Hansen]

Bryan,

No worries: I miss things in my mailbox, too.

So, is YAML the only way to do this?  The reason I ask is that I use HAML (I compile during development with a tool called CodeKit rather than at run-time...)

The links to the documentation make a lot of sense.  That will definitely make the warmup a lot more helpful for ruby newbies like myself.

Thanks!

--Chris

[Bryan Powell]

Yes, YAML is the only way to specify page metadata. But, it would work just fine with HAML views since Pakyow parses the front-matter before running the view through a processor that would convert HAML to HTML. Happy to provide an example if you need one.

Bryan P.