Almost Waltzing
After a weekend of intermittent hacking, I am getting close to being able to release a preview of Waltz, my Hugo/Middleman alternative written in Perl and Dancer2. I still have a few important milestones to cross, but I have almost got it to the point of hosting this blog. Almost.
I have all of this site’s templates converted to Template::Toolkit now, and all of the content is rendering with the development server (written in Dancer2). The site looks just like this does now, which is awesome. I extracted the rendering code from the Dancer2 controller and put it in its own business object, so I have been able to start testing some of the functionality there.
Speaking of tests, I have a few rudimentary tests in place at this time. There is a lot to do, but hopefully by tomorrow or so, I will have tests for most all of the current functionality. From here, I hope to keep the tests paced with the application code. If only the docs were at that point!
Content can only be displayed in the dev server at present. There is no capacity to publish the content to static pages. I have it stubbed out, I know how it is going to work, but it’s not there yet. Once I get the testing situated, this is my next priority.
The command line is woefully unfinished. I might add subcommands for creating a new site and a new page before releasing a preview of Waltz, or if there is enough interest, I might release without these and let people copy files around for a few days while I flesh these out.
There is a lot of functionality left to do, but Hugo and Middleman have a huge start on me. I don’t expect to catch up, and I don’t expect this to catch fire. But hopefully, before long, this will give me a tool I feel more comfortable using and will suit my needs. And maybe others too.
Until next time… :)