Comatose, TNG

The response I’ve gotten on Comatose is somewhat overwhelming. I’m glad so many of you have found it useful!

Hopefully I won’t annoy you guys too much with the next release… It has quite a lot of updates, and changes. Enough to warrant this post on it as a kind of ‘heads up’.

If you’ve made customizations to the admin, and if you have used an svn:external to keep up to date with Comatose — you may want to remove the external and commit the current version (0.5) into your plugin directory… Otherwise you will need to tweak some things when I commit the next version.

In the next release, what is now the ComatoseController is going to be broken down into two separate controllers. There will still be a ComatoseController, it’s purpose will be rendering and caching pages. A new ComatoseAdminController will be the home for all of the administration tools. They will each have a before_filter that calls #authorize for authentication purposes.

The way layouts are handled internally has changed too. The controllers will now extend your ApplicationController, so you should be able to use partials and application helpers in your content layouts.

The biggest change, however, is in the page processing. Liquid will be the new default text processor. Don’t panic — ERB will still be available as a configuration option. But I really want a safer way to support content processing. To go along with that, I’m adding a simple method for adding custom functions to the processors that’ll work for both Liquid and ERB. Also, Liquid will be packaged with the plugin, so you won’t have to worry about having it as a dependency.

There are, at this point, no schema changes — so there won’t be a need for new migrations. There’s quite a few more changes I could talk about, but these are the main things that are some-what breaking changes.

I’ll be releasing the new version later this week.