What's Upcoming in Simplist 0.6
Sep 03, 2006After releasing Simplist 0.5 into the open last week it’s gotten a good reception and I’ve gotten some helpful feedback. I’m expecting to release Simplist 0.6 sometime in the coming week, and it’s looking to be a significant improvement over 0.5. Here’s what to expect beyond the minor bug fixes:
Preview Edits Without Saving
This was a major goal for me, as initially I had just had the Preview function as a simple action. This meant that unsaved changes would be lost. Not so much a bug as it was a big glaring gotcha. This has been fixed for 0.6, so you can do some editing preview your work without saving. This should be especially helpful making changes to pages and already published posts.
Comments
Allowing visitors to leave comments on posts was something I’ve been very undecided upon for a long time. Almost as long as I’ve had Simplist in development. Since adding comments isn’t a hard problem to solve, I went ahead and added the functionality in. While it adds another layer of complexity to managing a website with a blog, I’ve tried to make it as simple as possible to turn comments on/off for each post, and make it easy to delete posts. I’m also looking into the best way to prevent comment spam, since this is such a prevalent problem on the web.
Local and Global Uploads
Allowing uploads to be located at the post / page level or be site wide was important to me from a usability standpoint. It makes it easier to upload images and files as you create content and keeps the uploads nicely organized. All uploads will still be stored on the file system though so technically they will be available regardless of what they are associated with.
Easy Upgrade Process
Upgrading Simplist is a bit trickier than it is for many Rails CMS applications because it is expected that developers will dig into the source code and customize Simplist. Currently the best way I’ve found to keep the process as pain free as possible is making a full version and changes-only version with each release. This way developers can incorporate changes quickly as they are added and new developers can still get the full release of Simplist.
Final Notes
I think Simplist 0.6 will be a lot closer to what I envisioned when I started extracting it out from the code that runs Myers DS. Look for it in the next week or so.