Monday 8 December 2014

EX power

So this weekend Strehler received a major release and two minor bugfix releases and it's now at 1.4.2.

When I completed Strehler backend I was so excited about how easy was to install it and start writing contents for a site. Then, I started working on a real frontend and I found doing that a very boring work, with a lot of copy-and-paste and clumsy writing.

Creating Strehler I was obsessed by the opportunity to make it highly configurable because in my life I always stop loving packages like it when I found what they decided by themself, without asking my opinion. Most of Strehler has a parameter that control it, side effect of this is that you have to write a lot to make the whole thing having the right place.

High level refactoring of this exists. What about taking all the boring code I wrote for fulfill simple tasks and "hide" it behind Dancer2 keyword? The EX plugin was born.

The EX plugin is a collection of keywords for standard cases. In particular they can be used to serve a content called using its slug, to display a list of contents of a category or just to manage a page with contents that you write once and then you throw away (like homepage boxes).

EX plugin keywords can still be a little complex to understand, because they need obviously nested hashes to work well, but at least you have just to understand the meaning of their parameters and not perl code to use them and documentation can help you doing this.

It's also a point of my todo page so i'm really proud of it!

I'm less proud about the two minor releases. The first was done because I wantend more options and configurable things in EX plugin plus a smarter way to write code. The second was done because I did the first too fast :-)