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. ;)
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’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.
Today I got two major bits of functionality in: Publ will now asynchronously scan the content index (which speeds up startup and fixes some annoying race conditions with entry creation), and it also asynchronously generates image renditions (which makes pages not take forever to load on first render, and will also use multiple CPU cores if available). Seems to work well so far.
I was running into scaling problems with beesbuzz.biz (what with there being a couple thousand entries and some pages with hundreds of images on it) and this keeps it feeling pretty good.
