It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to work on Publ, but the great thing is that I actually had a reason to work on it for my day job. Which is to say I’m finally being paid to work on Publ. ;)
Fixed a subtle caching bug that affects sites accessible from multiple URLs
Fixed the way that size-clamping (max_width et al) work on remote and static images
Enable JPEG optimization in the image renderer
Add the ability to link to local rendered images in a Markdown link
Also, if you’re using Publ and hosting your repository on GitHub you may have gotten a security warning regarding the version of pyyaml that Publ depends on. Don’t worry, Publ doesn’t actually use the vulnerable code (it’s actually pulled in by one of the utility scripts from the watchdog library, and not used by watchdog itself). Watchdog has an open issue about this and they’re on track to fix it Real Soon Now.
In the future Publ may actually pull in pyyaml itself for the friends-only functionality, but when it does you can be sure it’ll be a current version. :)
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
