New w3blog release, version 0.5

After some months without much free time, I finally could sit down a week ago and start working on an update to my blog engine that had been sitting on my to-do list for quite some time. This update brings improvements and new features to w3blog.

First of all, bloat was removed on the front end (client) side of things. I got rid of Bootstrap, and JQuery, and rewrote the default CSS sheet. The default look of the engine is actually pleasant to look at, the css sheet weighs only 5.6K unminified (vs 138K of minified bootstrap's css), and of course weight has also been slimmed down by removing JQuery (it was only really needed by bootstrap).

v0.4 default look

v0.5 default look

Speaking about improvements, comments now have a date of publishing. Really not sure how I overlooked such a thing for so long.

The new features are:

• Dynamic loading of posts on the main page, and category and archive pages. If you turn on this feature, instead of getting the traditional pagination buttons at the end of the page, you get a button to load the next batch of posts through AJAX, so that it doesn't load a whole new page. You turn this by adding 'dynamic_load': True to WEBLOG_SETTINGS.
• Infinite scroll for dynamic loading. When this and dynamic loading are active, after scrolling to the bottom of the page (index, category page, archive page), the next batch of posts are loaded automatically through AJAX. Turn on dynamic loading (see above) and add 'infinite_load': True to WEBLOG_SETTINGS.
• Floating sidebar. To turn this feature on, you add 'floating_sidebar': True to WEBLOG_SETTINGS. What this does, is make the sidebar float next to the content container after scrolling past the navbar and breadcrumb bar.
• These are basically all of the changes in this new release. If you happen to already be using w3blog and are using a custom css sheet, you will need to redo your css since the templates changed a bit since version 0.4, mainly the html/css classes used. You will also need to make migrations and migrate them to the database.

I had plans for other features for this release, but I decided to postpone them for now. One of them was a way to add custom elements/html to the sidebar without having to modify w3blog templates. Unfortunately I didn't find a sane way of doing this.

If you have any issues with w3blog, or maybe even suggestions, the first option would be to open an issue on its Github page, if you don't have a Github account (and don't want to create one), you can write me an email at contact@yaroslavps.com. However, if you are using one of the big email providers (e.g. outlook or gmail), my response could be blocked by your provider.

w3blog's GitHub page.