Mango

This release actually reduces Mango's feature set. Over the past 18 months, mistakes have been made – niche features and Mango-specific syntax have been added. Mango was conceived as a simple app dedicated to publishing Markdown documents. The 0.8 release rectifies several deviations from this goal.

One year ago today, I started a Gmail thread with the subject "Markdown+Django project". Rereading the e-mail, it's clear that I was both excited and naïve at the time.

Over the past year, Mango's feature set has grown and its performance has improved, but the motivation behind its development has remained unchanged.

I was motivated by the belief that highly readable, metadata-enriched text files offer many benefits over database entries as a store for online content. A year on, I'm now convinced of this.

The last line of that initial message, sent to my brother, Chris, makes me smile:

I reckon we'd get this finished by the end of the long weekend if we were to get stuck in.

I'm currently stuck trying to turn Mango's excerpts and updates into better Markdown citizens. Today I decided to work on something less difficult, and more interesting from a user's perspective: related posts.

"Related posts" feature in action at David Chambers Design

Hot on the heels of 0.6 comes the latest stable release. I'm very excited about the feature this release introduces, so I'll skip the preamble.

Requiring files

From time to time a post requires something a little special. Custom styling perhaps, or JavaScript snippets for an embedded demo. How does one provide such things? Generally by adding custom style rules to a global style sheet (inefficient!), and by including <script> tags in a post's body (dirty!).

The highlights of this release are sitemaps and a much-needed update script. Also significant are fixes which deliver full functionality to non-/ installations.