Pretzel: Recap

6 February, 2012

Things were a bit quiet in the chatroom with @tobin taking a well-deserved holiday, but we've made a lot of progress on Pretzel - our site generation tool using .NET.

Current Features

How far did we get this week?

You can setup a new website using these three steps.

EDIT: here's a quick wiki article to get this running from the command line.

This provides the demo site we've configured to help get people started experimenting - including images, styles and a sample post.

You can then edit the files in the folder and see the site regenerate

If you want to understand more of how this tool works, have a read of the Jekyll wiki - this will help understand the concepts that Jekyll uses to differentiate between pages and posts, and how to configure your sites - this should help answer any initial questions users have about getting started with your own websites.

Some other features on top of the site generation underway:

• Wordpress Importing has begun - we'll update the documentation as soon as that is officially ready
• LESS compilation and JS minification within the 'bake' step.
• Razor template support - this is not as far along as our Liquid support, but is an excellent experiment with plugging in other templating engines.

More Features

As we get time, these features are also planned:

• Liquid extensions - including a decent set of extensions for users to integrate into their themes
• Refining the default project site to be a bit more featureful
• The ideas around mixing static and dynamic content (one big idea was to leverage AppHarbor to support this) didn't get off the ground.

- Weekly Fun stats

There were 13 contributors this week - some new faces and some familiar ones.

The punch card graph from GitHub shows how busy we were across the week.

What's Next?

The post for the next idea will be up shortly - we've been discussing in the chatroom how to tackle this idea, so stay tuned.