Things comming together - I've been continuing my work on the interleaved everything redesign of the website. It's all part of the bigger epic of sorts to get the blogging balance right. I wrote a few days ago about possibilities spaces and refactoring, something that amazes me each time.
This morning was another small milestone on the journey. I'd previously refactored the base layer so all posting goes through the same code. All the various post types are accomodated and you can turn different features on and off easily. Things that previously took weeks to implement are now just a single boolean config. The blog, linkblog, podcast, newsletter and notes plugins were updated already, and they appear to work fine with the latest common base layer.
Yesterday and this morning though I was updating the archives plugin. The archives plugin is a biggie because it uses components inside all the other plugins to create archives in a standard way, but in the style of each plugin. I don't mean style in the CSS sense, but more just way to refer to the general shape of the HTML of each item. I also wrote the archives plugin quite a long time ago, when things were very different. I was expecting some difficulties, and maybe even for things to get a bit nasty.
There were difficulties for sure. I had to rename a whole load of variables. So many, in so many places, that I just thought this is going to get ugly. I also had to update some component interfaces. I took the time to clean things up, and more intentionally use the different ways of passing data throughout the render pipeline. But this morning, after finding a silly bug where I had passed a variable into the wrong level, it all worked!
Now I'm genuinely excited to test all the latest plugins rendering the real website. It feels a little bit like christmas eve, but much more serious of course. This part of coding is great, you actually wake up in the morning and can't wait to get it all working. It makes all the hard work worth the effort.
Update: It's funny, shortly after writing this note I remembered a few things I still have to do in order to test with the real website. You can't hold everything in your head, another reason why writing it up like this is very useful :) #