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 :-)

404 Ghost workaround

A little recap:

Here I stated a problem about phantom 404 and  a (wrong) solution to it.
Here I confessed I was working on the issue.
Here It's the work I'm doing with a long and boring description of the problem that I'll not repeat in this blog.

...but probably you don't want to wait until the problem is really closed because you have (as me) a package that you want on CPAN to share it with the world.

Oh yes, the problem! Let me say it with few words:
You have a plugin that modify the request path in a before hook. You want that, when the user write (for example) /prefix/good/path, your plugin change it to /good/path. Obviously the code that will answer to this will be:

get '/good/path' => sub {...}

You don't define anything about /prefix/good/path because the plugin will always change it, so you'll never need to answer with it.
This works! I can swear it calling Wotan on my side. But when you try to test it with dzil test the test you wrote fails.

Long explanation for why this happen, as I said, is here. Little workaround you can use to stop this happening is adding a public directory under the t with just a dummy file. This way fix the problem and make you test suit running flawless!

In the previous episodes of Battlestar Galactica...

I didn't write anything for a lot of time because I was on holiday and (more important) a lot of things happened in the Dancer2 World and I was a bit confused about some of them.

First important news, for me, is that use Dancer2 :sytanx is no more from 0.07. I was a little puzzled about it because, as I wrote here the pure use Dancer2 is a powerful spell that do many things and sometimes it could be more than what you want.
I asked for enlightement (i'm still a barbarian, you know) and Sawyer X himself gave me this answer about it.
So, using use Dancer2 also when you're not creating an app is good.
All I said about apps  and scope is still valid, so we can say farewell to use Dancer2 :syntax (a legacy of Dancer) with no regret.

Second question I'm working about is nasty like a leprechaun with no sense of humor that hate Harry Potter. In this article I talked about phantom 404 that raise instead of the right answer while testing. I thought this issue was solved using TCP::Test. This is not true, there is still a lot of work to do about this fascinating enigma and it's exactly what I'm doing right now. It's an indispensable step to release my Dancer2 plugin (Dancer2::Plugin::Multilang) on CPAN so I'm working hard about it!

Stay tuned!

Dancer2::Plugin::Multilang

So, my wonderful Dancer2 plugin to manage multilanguage sites is released on github!

I wrote in this blog something I learned developing it, so I think that this place is the right one to make the announce.

I tryed to design this plugin as "plug-and-play" as possible. With it, you should be able to make your site multilanguage with no other effort then... translate the contents.

Netx step is releasing it on CPAN but I never did something like that so I have to learn how. I hope to learn it well enough to come back and writing about it in my blog, but now I don't have enough time to do it, so this topic has to wait a little.

In the meantime download, try, fork and play with my plugin as long as you want. Feedbacks (yes, bad feedbacks too) are welcome!