Announcements and News about AkashaCMS

The big goal with AkashaRender is simplifying the content editing experience. Until now that meant encuraging the use of Markdown when editing content, and EJS for writing templates. Markdown isn't the only easy-to-use content format. AsciiDoc is widely used especially in book authoring, and is far more powerful than Markdown.

Initial AsciiDoc support has been added to AkashaRender. This post is being written with the AsciiDoc Renderer, and the AkashaCMS Example website has a corresponding test page.

A purpose of a system like AkashaCMS is simplifying the work of content authors to more efficiently write their content. The task of simplifying work is multi-faceted and can be taken in many different directions.

The task at hand was to collapse the <figure>/<img> combination into a simplified tag.

This combination is the preferred way of presenting images, especially when there's to be a caption.

Yesterday I announced the 2nd edition of Creating eBooks with Markdown and Open Source Tools is available on the Amazon Kindle store, and will be available on other marketplaces soon. I also tangentially talked about the lack of other tools with similar capabilities. It seems from my incomplete survey of the market that software to create EPUB's or static HTML websites usually require either an installed server-side rendering system, or else a heavy-weight WYSIWYG desktop-publishing application.

What the AkashaRender, AkashaCMS, AkashaEPUB system offers is lightweight tools that run on your laptop yet produce websites or EPUB's built using the latest web techniques.

Let's talk about that for a bit.

In June and July, I set about updating the AkashaCMS toolchain to be based on AkashaRender. The AkashaEPUB toolchain also had to change, and that necessitated a new edition of Creating eBooks with Markdown and Open Source Tools. This book is the official guide for using AkashaCMS/AkashaEPUB tools to build electronic books. The major feature addition, despite it being much easier to configure AkashaRender to produce EPUB's, is that you can now publish to both EPUB and Website from the same content.

I haven't found another system to do that - to publish exactly the same content as either EPUB or a Website. Okay, that's not quite right since Gitbook can publish to EPUB, MOBI, PDF or online. However, Gitbook limits you to using their servers which just doesn't make sense. Rendering EPUB's and Websites is a lightweight lightweight enough to run on your laptop. Why use a SaaS eBook-publishing system that ensnare's you into using their server? With AkashaEPUB, you get a light-weight system that can run on any computer, and publish EPUB's or websites.

It's now required that outbound links to sites that pay money (e.g. affiliate marketing) be marked with rel=nofollow. Your visitors might feel comforted being informed that a link leads to an external site, and perhaps to know what site that is.

The akashacms-embeddables plugin has long been a sore thumb, being overly complicated in part because of the wide variety of methods for embedding content from other sites. It may seem utterly simple when you paste a URL into a Facebook or Twitter status message, or a Wordpress blog post, and voila the embedded HTML snippet automatically pops up. Under the covers certain kinds of magic is done with oEmbed and OpenGraph protocols. A couple years ago when I started the akashacms-embeddables plugin that stuff either was immature, or I didn't understand it, or didn't know about it, or something, but the initial versions of the plugin didn't take advantage of those protocols, and instead had lots of special casing and hard-coded understanding of how to construct a Twitter iframe.

Now that the new AkashaRender-based system is published, I wanted to take the opportunity to clean up the akashacms-embeddables plugin. I've found a pair of packages that make retrieving oEmbed and OpenGraph data very nice and easy.

A couple years ago I grew dissatisfied enough with the design of akashacms, the previous processing engine in AkashaCMS. It was a powerful system, with it I built several large websites, wrote a book, and so forth. But its inner structure had grown organically into a bit of a mess. My pondering about what to do led me to implement a complete rewrite. The new rendering engine, AkashaRender, is more flexible and is more sensibly organized. It is also incompatible with the older system.

Over the last week I have deprecated the old akashacms-based system, and have published updates to everything including the plugins and this website. This blog post goes over what's happened.

I'm going to be declaring AkashaCMS 0.3.x pretty soon, and I have an interesting new feature in the works.  The idea is to support multi-way extensibility of the processing of a website via the configuration file.  The implementation is a form of "plugin" that allows anybody to write a module that extends the configuration of an AkashaCMS site, add new processing functions, hooks at different steps of the processing, and add directories managed by the plugin containing assets, layouts or partials.

Okay, that was pretty dense so let's take it one step at a time.