winterkoninkje | Titania (Reply)

So, after all too long of a wait I've finally converted my site over to Titania from the older SiteGen scripts it was based upon. Not all of the site is converted — just the blogs and the main site — but the rest will come in time. There were two holdups keeping me from switching over, though there are more before an official version can be released.

For those who don't know, Titania is a web development framework I started up last summer for the Google Summer of Code. It's currently in beta production at version 0.3.0 however that's not entirely accurate as the earliest versions of it grew out of version 6.0 SiteGen— that is, six ground up rewrites. The big shift for Titania was generalizing the program into a framework and removing all the hacks I'd made that only mattered for my own site. Even just in the little messing around I've done over the last couple days hunting down template bugs, it's glorious how much cleaner Titania is. I'll very much enjoy getting the rest of the site switched over.

As for the hangups, the first problem is that I hadn't implemented the pb:ctimef() function from Paperboy in the pure Perl emulation Titania's currently using. Or so I thought. Somewhere along the line it looks like I implemented that. The second issue was being able to do inline footnotes[1] and have them be translated correctly, i.e. rendered as a superscript and putting the content at the end of the entry. Well I finally managed to slay that beast, and I even managed to do it in XSLT so there was no need to dirty Titania's code with a hack to make it work.

So here are some of the other things standing in the way of a full v1.0 release. Well the biggest one is that Titania doesn't actually use Paperboy for the backend ^_^;; That's been held up by waiting for the v2.0 release, which will come in time. The conversion to a library is already done, so I could start working on the XS though the library might change between now and v2.0. Another thing that's big for me is being able to do embedded XSLT in XML. If you notice, the blog preview on the main page is no more. Embedded XSLT is what it would take to bring that back. Those are the big things. There are some smaller polishing tasks like adding template version checking and designing a worthwhile commandline interface, but they'll just take the time to implement them.

So if you notice any issues with the website or the blogs (broken links, missing images, etc) please let me know. Though, somehow I doubt very many of you actually look at the site since the RSS feeds had been broken ever since the switch to llama and noone mentioned it. At least embarrassing remnants like that shouldn't happen anymore now; benefits of a coherent framework.

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