Aug 09
18
1 year of Clay Framework development
Around the middle of August marked 1 year since I began working on the Clay Framework. It’s been a short year… I never would have believed I’d work on it this long without a Beta release. I’ve often wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have started out with a more open source approach, but I think the things I’ve learned over the last year are worth the path I’ve taken. I’ve rewritten much of it a few times and working those changes into release cycles would have prolonged development even further, I think.
I will be pushing a majority of the Clay code base to an SVN repository soon (a long with a public release), I just haven’t decided what version number tag I want it to have. It will either be called 0.4.x Beta or 0.9 Beta. There is kind of a good reason for the split decision: I consider the framework to be the back end functionality, not the extra bells and whistles using the functionality. I don’t want a heavy framework, that was the sole purpose of writing Clay in the first place. The framework, IMHO, is the main class [the API loader and bootstrap], the application layer [responsible for building the output data], and the template layer [responsible for deciding how and where to display the output data] – all of those I consider to be at least deserving of a 0.9 version number. There are “features” missing, compared to the heavier frameworks, but those are more of the content genre, not the back end. I am leaning toward releasing Clay Framework as 0.9 and having a separate package that I release as a Content Management System. That will allow me to keep the framework light and independent from the features I don’t consider as back end [in essence "bloat"-proofing the framework].
Summary: Clay is mostly where I want it to be as a framework, but adding too much more to it will make it a content management system. After a year of development, Clay [Framework] is maturing toward 1.0 status, while a Clay CMS hasn’t arrived yet. I look forward to the day [soon] when Clay is in the wild and, hopefully, some others can help me build it toward 2.0.
