Nov 09
1
Clay Development in October
October was a fairly decent month for Clay development. It now has an almost complete alpha installer… heh. I call it an alpha installer because it is currently the only administrative GUI to Clay. The way Clay is wired makes it somewhat complex on the administrative side; it uses a fully configurable/strict approach. The installer is intended to give you a logical approach to configuring the sites, while handling the strict configuration requirements on the backend. So, yeah, the installer is at about 80%, I’d say, and I’ve begun sending it out to some other people that have requested to join in development of Clay.
The ‘core’ APIs of Clay grew a little this month. I was comparing the current version with older versions and it looks like Clay grew from about 500 lines to just over 900 lines. That of course is counting comments and probably some commented blocks of test code here and there. My goal in the beginning was to keep it under 1000 lines, which is obviously not going to happen. To be fair, this is only the number of lines in clay.php, which currently contains most of the core APIs needed to run a web site. ClayDB, Creole, and some other APIs are divided into their own folders.
I’ve updated Sculpt, Clay’s template engine, to allow tiered template overrides, perform template includes (without using the application engine), and centralized template rendering within a single function. Sculpt now behaves a lot like Xaraya’s blocklayout, with the exception of the special tags in templates.
November is going to be a busy month for me, not including what I want to do with Clay. I’m hoping, over the next couple of months, to round out the installer, setup a development web site specifically for Clay development, and have atleast an Alpha release ready for New Year’s.