CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

0.15.0 (11 July 2023)

• Upgrade to Sinatra 3. (Graham Ashton)

• The models.rb file has been long and unnecessarily hard to navigate for too long. It has been split up into multiple files, one for each class. (Graham Ashton, suggested by Lilith River)

• Remove support for the BlueCloth markdown library. Nesta uses Tilt for rendering Markdown, and BlueCloth support has been removed in Tilt 2.2.0. See rtomayko/tilt#382 for details.

  If your site uses BlueCloth, remove your call to Tilt.prefer, and Nesta will use its default Markdown processor. See Nesta's docs on configuring the Markdown processor for more details.

  (Graham Ashton)

0.14.0 (23 March 2023)

• Nesta can now be used as a Static Site Generator (SSG) with its new nesta build command! Server Side Rendering (SSR) is still supported, as is development with a local web server.

  Back in the days when Heroku allowed us to deploy Nesta on their platform for free, there really didn't seem to be any point in converting a site to a bunch of static HTML and CSS files. If you enabled the appropriate HTTP cache-control headers, Heroku would automatically cache an entire site in memory, so there was no real performance benefit. That's why Nesta never had SSG support, even though everybody seemed to think it was cool.

  But Heroku is not free any more. And there's a wide choice of hosting platforms for static site generators. So why not?

  See the docs for full details, but in short:

  • If you run bundle exec nesta build, Nesta will generate a static copy of your site in a ./dist directory.

  • You might want to add ./dist to your .gitignore file.

  • There are a couple of new config settings in config.yml.

  • You can configure hosting platforms like Netlify, AWS Amplify, Vercel (and others) to redeploy your site by running the build command when you push changes to your git repository.

  This was fun to implement. (Graham Ashton)

• Sass and SCSS files are now rendered with Dart Sass (the main implementation of Sass). We had been using the (now deprecated) libsass library.

  Sass has changed a bit since libsass was current, so you may need to make some small changes to your stylesheets. Documentation that should help with those changes can be found here:

  https://sass-lang.com/documentation/breaking-changes

• Replace Nesta's custom template-locating code with Sinatra's #find_template method. (Graham Ashton, suggested by Lilith River)

• Update multiple dependencies to fix security vulnerabilities; see commit history for details. (Graham Ashton)

• Built-in support for configuring Nesta via environment variables has been dropped. (Graham Ashton)

  Should you still want to configure Nesta via the environment you can use Erb in config.yml, like this:

  some_value: <%= ENV.fetch('NESTA_VARIABLE') %>
  

• During a tidy up of the config file code, the yaml_conf attribute on the Nesta::Config class has been renamed to config. This is unlikely to affect you, but if it does just change the name. (Graham Ashton)

• The yaml_path attribute on the Nesta::Config class has been moved to Nesta::ConfigFile.path. Again, I can't imagine why anybody would have written code that used it, but it's a breaking change so I'm mentioning it. (Graham Ashton)

• Support for loading plugins from a local directory (which was deprecated in version 0.9.10) has been removed. (Graham Ashton)

• The local_stylesheet? helper method (deprecated in 0.9.1) has been removed. (Graham Ashton)

• The breadcrumb_label helper method (deprecated in 0.9.3) has been removed. (Graham Ashton)

0.13.0 (28 September 2022)

• Update dependencies in order to support Ruby 3.0 and above. (Graham Ashton)

• Upgrade multiple dependencies to fix security vulnerabilities. (Graham Ashton)

• Switch Git repository URLs to HTTPS (fixes the demo:content command). (Graham Ashton)

• Update dependency on Haml; Nesta currently requires a version lower than 6.0. (Graham Ashton)

• Refactor: Extracted logic for running external processes into a new Nesta::SystemCommand class. (Graham Ashton)

• Refactor: Created a new Nesta::Commands::Template class for commands that create files from templates. (Graham Ashton)

• Refactor: Move logic for editing the config file from within Nesta's commands into new Nesta::ConfigFile class. (Graham Ashton)

• Stopped the test suite from executing external commands during tests. (Graham Ashton)

0.12.0 (30 June 2020)

• Upgrade to Sinatra 2 and Rack 2. (Graham Ashton)

• Upgrade from tilt 1.4 to 2.0. (Graham Ashton)

• Replace the deprecated sass gem with sassc. (Brad Weslake)

• Port the test suite from RSpec and Webrat to Minitest and Capybara. (Graham Ashton)

• Silence deprecation warnings produced under Ruby 2.7. (Graham Ashton)

• Stop running the test suite under Ruby 2.3 and 2.4, both of which have reached end-of-life. (Graham Ashton)

0.11.1 (26 March 2015)

• Tighten dependency on Tilt, as version 2.x is incompatible. (Graham Ashton)

0.11.0 (16 March 2015)

• Allow Haml pages to use the built-in Markdown filter again, by including the haml-contrib gem. (Jordan Owens)

• When building the breadcrumb (e.g. "Home > Category > Page") for a page whose URL is at the top level of a site, include a page's first category in the breadcrumb. See #147 for an example. (Jordan Owens)

• Print an error message when one of Nesta's command line tools calls an external process (e.g. git), but the command doesn't return successfully. (Graham Ashton)

• When the menu.txt pointed to a page that didn't exist, Nesta would silently stop generating the menu, and links to pages further down the file would be ignored. This is now fixed; the missing page is ignored and the rest of the menu is generated. (Jordan Owens)

• Nesta previously expected all Markdown files to be named with a .mdown extension. The (commonly used) .md extension is now supported as well. (Phillip Miller)

• The Google Analytics JavaScript code has been updated to their Universal Analytics version. (Graham Ashton)

• Relax restrictions on how Nesta can be configured. Previously Nesta would only read if config.yml file if there weren't any environment variables set. This restriction is historic, and unhelpful. See https://github.com/gma/nesta/commit/bac50974 for details. (Glenn Gillen)

• Plugins are distributed as gems. We've previously relied upon Bundler to generate plugin gems for us, but when Bundler changed the format of its generated gems they no longer worked with Nesta. Nesta now generates gems from scratch (from a template), which removes our dependency on a third party tool. (Jordan Owens, Glenn Gillen, Graham Ashton)

• Support for Ruby 2.2. (Graham Ashton)

0.10.0 (25 April 2014)

• Upgraded the default theme to a responsive design, using Google's Roboto Slab web font. (Graham Ashton)

• Reduced the amount of I/O required to load a page with some judicious in memory caching of filenames. Expect a speed boost! (Graham Ashton)

• Added 'Link text' metadata. When working out how to link to your pages from the automatically generated menus and breadcrumbs, Nesta uses the page's heading. It still does, but if you want to use different words when linking to the page in breadcrumbs or in the menu you can by defining the "Link text" metadata. (Micah Chalmer)

  NOTE: Some existing sites may have pages that don't define a heading. Those sites will not work with Nesta 0.10.0 until they've been upgraded; either add an h1 level heading at the top of your pages (preferred) or define the 'Link text' metadata. If you don't want h1 headings to appear at the top of your web pages, hide them with CSS (this is the best approach for accessibility), or define the "Link text" metadata.

• The text used in the 'Read more' link is now configurable in config.yml. The config key is called read_more. (Pete Gadomski)

  See the config.yml template (on GitHub) for more details. https://github.com/gma/nesta/blob/master/templates/config/config.yml

• Added the skip-sitemap flag, to prevent a page from being listed in the XML sitemap. Add 'Flags: skip-sitemap' to the top of your page to enable it. Draft pages have also been removed from the sitemap. (Suggested by Joshua Mervine, implemented by Graham Ashton)

• Added support for user-defined config settings in config.yml. If you've ever wanted to add config settings to config.yml and then access them from within your app.rb file or templates, this is for you.

  There's a new Nesta::Config.fetch method for reading these settings. It can also read settings from the environment, looking for variables whose names are prefixed with "NESTA_". For example, the value in the NESTA_MY_SETTING variable can be returned by calling Nesta::Config.fetch(:my_setting).

  If the setting you're trying to read isn't defined a NotDefined exception (a subclass of KeyError) will be raised. Similarly to Ruby's Hash#fetch method, you can avoid the exception by specifying a second argument (such as nil) that will be returned if the setting isn't defined.

  (Sean Redmond, Graham Ashton)

• The built-in file caching (where Nesta could write generated HTML for rendered pages to disk) has been removed. If you'd like to cache pages to disk, use the sinatra-cache gem.

  See http://nestacms.com/docs/deployment/page-caching for more details, and instructions for installing and testing sintra-cache.

  (Graham Ashton)

• The nesta script's theme:create command now copies default templates into a new theme. (Jake Rayson)

• Added the --zsh-completion option to the nesta command, which outputs code that will configure command line completion in Zsh for the nesta command. (Wynn Netherland)

• Page titles no longer include the heading from the parent page. Behaviour was a little inconsistent, and it's arguably not a great feature in the first place. Since the Title metadata appeared you can ovverride the page title to something more useful if you need to too. (Graham Ashton)

• When commenting via Disqus is configured, comments appeared on every page in earlier versions of Nesta. From now on only pages with a date set (i.e. articles) will display the comment form by default. If you've copied the comments.haml template into your ./views folder (or into a theme) you'll need to modify it slightly. See the if statement in the latest version.

  If you'd actually like comments to appear on every page of your site, redefine the Page#receives_comments? method in your app.rb file, so that it returns true.

  (Graham Ashton)

• Breadcrumbs include Microdata for use by search engines. See: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=185417 (Sean Schofield)

• The menu and breadcrumb helper methods can now generate HTML that identifies the current page. When viewing a page that appears in the menu, its menu item will have the class "current". To change the name of the class, override the Nesta::Navigation::current_menu_item_class method.

  The current page doesn't have a class applied by default. If you want to add a class to style it, override the ::current_breadcrumb_class method (also in the Nesta::Navigation module), returning a string.

  (Pete Gadomski)

• Version 0.9.13 used Sinatra's url helper method to generate links to pages on the site. When these pages were cached by proxy servers the hostname in the URL could be set incorrectly, as it would be determined from the HTTP headers (see issue #103 for more details).

  The solution was to link to pages on the current site using an absolute path, rather than a full URL. The path_to helper was added, and used in place of Sinatra's url helper method.

  (Micah Chalmer)

• Updated the test suite from RSpec 1.3 to RSpec 2. (Wynn Netherland, Graham Ashton)

• Support for Ruby 1.8 has been dropped. Ruby 1.9.3 or above is recommended.

• There were also plenty of small bug fixes that didn't make it into this list. See GitHub for the full list of commits. https://github.com/gma/nesta/compare/v0.9.13...v0.10.0

0.9.13 (3 March 2012)

• The nesta script has a new command; edit. You can pass it the path to a file within your content/pages folder and it will open the file in your default editor (as set by the EDITOR environment variable).

• The nesta script has a new option; --bash-completion. Run nesta with this option and it will print some Bash that will configure command line completion for the nesta command.

  You can type nesta edit <TAB> and Bash will complete the names of the files in your content/pages directory. :-)

  Installation instructions at the top of the Bash script.

• Nesta can now be mounted cleanly at a path, rather than at a site's root, and assets and links will be served correctly. (Max Sadrieh, Graham Ashton)

• The default config.ru file that is generated when you create a new project now enables Etag HTTP headers. (Max Sadrieh)

• Two helper methods have been removed; url_for and base_url. Use Sinatra's url helper instead. They would have been deprecated rather than removed, but if you try and load Nesta's helpers in a Rails app url_for breaks Rails's rendering. (Max Sadrieh, Graham Ashton)

• The Page class has a new method; body_markup. It can be overridden by a plugin, and is used by the foldable plugin. (Micah Chalmer)

• The current_item? helper has been created in Nesta::Navigation. You can override it to implement your own logic for determining whether or not a menu item rendered by the menu helpers are considered to be "current". (Chad Ostrowski)

• The FileModel class has a new method; parse_metadata. It can be overriden by plugins that implement an alternate metadata syntax. Used by the yaml-metadata plugin.

• Erb templates in your ./views folder, or in a theme's folder, will now be found when you call Sinatra's erb helper method.

• config.yml can now contain Erb (and therefore inline Ruby), which will be interpreted when loaded. (Glenn Gillen)

• Extended the nesta command to support new commands that could (for example) be added by a plugin. The class to be instantiated within the Nesta::Commands module is determined from the command line argument (e.g. nesta plugin:create will instantiate the class called Nesta::Commands::Plugin::Create).

• Bug fix: Don't crash if a page's metadata only contains the key, with no corresponding value. You could argue this wasn't a bug, but the error message was difficult to trace. See #77.

• Bug fix: Summaries on Haml pages were not marked up as paragraphs. See #75.

0.9.12 (Released then pulled, due to rubygems [still] being a total mess)

0.9.11 (22 September 2011)

• Use Tilt to render the Markdown, Textile and Haml in content/pages. RDiscount is now the default Markdown processor. To continue using Maruku add it to Gemfile and call Tilt.prefer Tilt::MarukuTemplate in your app.rb file.

• Remove trailing slashes from all URLs, redirecting to the URL without the slash. See ticket #60 on GitHub.

• Added the 'Articles heading' metadata key. When articles are listed on a category page, Nesta adds a heading above the articles based on the category's title (e.g. "Articles on Thing"). If you set the 'Articles heading' metadata Nesta will allow you to override the entire heading for a given page.

• Bug fix: require nesta/plugin automatically on load. The Nesta::Plugin.register method is called by plugins as soon as they are loaded, so we need to make it available. In 0.9.10 this method wasn't available until too late.

• Bug fix: Minor updates to the files generated by nesta plugin:create.

• Bug fix: Don't allow retrieval of the contents of any file within the content folder by crafting a relative path containing the string '../' (Louis Nyffenegger).

0.9.10 (9 September 2011)

• Load Nesta plugins from gems. Any gem whose name begins with nesta-plugin- can be used in a project by adding it to the project's Gemfile beneath the gem "nesta" line. New plugins can be created with the nesta plugin:create command.

• Mark pages as draft by setting a flag. Draft pages won't be shown in production, but will be visible on your local copy of your site (as it's running in production).

• Upgraded Sinatra to version 1.2.6. Upgraded other dependencies to latest compatible versions.

• Bug fix: The stylesheet helper method assumes that you're using the Sass rendering engine by default, which allows it to find .sass files within the gem if no matching files are found locally.

0.9.9 (24 August 2011)

• Bug fix: What a debacle this is turning into. The new Nesta::Env class must be required before the code in 'nesta/app' is loaded. The previous release only loaded Nesta::Env when your started Nesta via config.ru. Running Nesta any other way lead to an immediate crash.

0.9.8 (22 August 2011)

• Bug fix: The Sinatra app's root directory wasn't set which meant that Nesta couldn't always find the ./public directory (such as when running on Heroku).

  The modifications made in 0.9.6 to make Nesta easier to mount inside another Rack application moved Nesta::App.root to the (new) Nesta::Env class. In 0.9.6 I forgot to actually set Nesta::App.root as well, which was a big mistake. Whoops.

0.9.7 (19 August 2011)

• No code changes from 0.9.6; version number increased to allow new gem to be deployed to rubygems.org.

0.9.6 (18 August 2011) [never released due to packaging bug]

• Nesta no longer cares whether you write your Sass stylesheets in the original indented Sass format or the default SCSS syntax (which is a superset of CSS). To use this functionality within your own site or theme change change any calls to the existing sass or scss helpers to stylesheet. (Isaac Cambron, Graham Ashton)

• Add an HTML class ("current") to the menu items whose path matches the current page.

• Bug fix: Strip trailing # characters from Markdown headings at the top of a page.

• Bug fix: Don't render the return value of local_stylesheet_link_tag directly into the page (haml_tag now writes direct to the output buffer).

• Bug fix: Removed trailing whitespace inside tags generated by the display_breadcrumbs() helper.

• Bug fix: Nesta::App.root couldn't be set until after nesta/app was required. Odd that, as the only reason to want to change Nesta::App.root would be before requiring nesta/app. Fixed by creating Nesta::Env and moving root to there instead.

0.9.5 (1 May 2011)

• Added --version option to nesta command (Christopher Lindblom).

• Upgraded Haml and Sass to version 3.1 (Andrew Nesbitt).

• Updated the URL from which the Disqus JavaScript is loaded (Sidharta Surya Kusnanto).

• Bug fix: Don't use parent's heading in page title if parent's heading is blank (Christopher Lindblom).

• Bug fix: Removed trailing whitespace inside tags generated by the display_menu() helper.

• Bug fix: Made article_summaries render summaries for the pages passed into it (Robert Syme).

• Bug fix: Empty files in the content directory would cause the site to crash - they are now served properly.

• Bug fix: When pages written in Haml were included on a category page the default theme didn't provide access to Sinatra's helper methods within Haml templates. See #18 (Carl Furrow).

0.9.4 (18 February 2011)

• Updated the link colours in the default theme.

• Set the default encoding to UTF-8. Without it Heroku would sometimes fail to render pages (issue 14).

0.9.3 (18 January 2011)

• The route and view for serving the home page (/) has been removed, and the home page must now be created as an index page in content/pages.

  You will have to create content/pages/index.haml manually when upgrading. Running nesta new mysite.com will create a content/pages/index.haml file that is suitable for a blog.

• The URL /my-page can be served from pages/my-page/index.mdown as well as pages/my-page.mdown (index pages can also be created with Textile or Haml, just like any other page).

• The description and keywords settings have been removed from config.yml as they can now be set on content/pages/index.haml.

• Added the Title metadata key to override a page's default title tag.

• Specify the sort order of pages that are listed on a category page. Optionally append a colon and a number to a path in the 'Categories' metadata to control the sort order of pages listed on the category page.

  See these files for the syntax: https://github.com/gma/nesta-demo-content/tree/master/pages/examples

• Support arbitrarily deep hierarchies when generating the breadcrumb (see the new helper method added to Nesta::Navigation).

• Dropped the --heroku switch (Heroku runs fine without it and there is less chance that committing config.yml to your repository will be an issue now that Nesta sites live in their own repositories).

• Re-implemented /articles.xml and /sitemap.xml in Haml, dropping the dependency on builder. This side steps a bug in Ruby 1.9.1, so Nesta can now run on 1.9.1 again. Also fixed a validity error in the Atom feed.

• Bug fix: Don't output empty

• tags for nested submenus that are beneath the requested number of levels.

0.9.2 (10 January 2011)

• Made the FileModel.metadata method public, to allow for custom metadata at the top of each page. (Wynn Netherland)

• Relaxed the stringent dependency specifications, using pessimistic version constraints (see http://docs.rubygems.org/read/chapter/16).

• Added templates required by nesta theme:create.

0.9.1 (31 December 2010)

• Re-implemented the default theme, using semantic HTML5 and Andy Clarke's Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS. Named the previous default theme "slate" and moved it into a separate GitHub project. https://github.com/gma/nesta-theme-slate

• Added --git switch to nesta new, that will create a new git repository and make an initial commit.

• Moved the navigation helpers into the Nesta::Navigation::Renderers module.

0.9.0 (20 December 2010)

• Packaged Nesta as a gem for the first time, instead of as a template site that can be cloned, edited and deployed. Added the nesta command for generating new sites and managing themes.

Previous versions (from 26 November 2008)

• Prior to 0.9.0 Nesta was distributed as a git repository that could be forked, edited and deployed. The only change log for these versions is the commit history:

  https://github.com/gma/nesta/commits/master