culann.com

Sandstone Preview: Roadmap

So you’ve already gotten a taste of what Sandstone currently provides. I’m much more excited, though, about the things that we’re working on. Here’s the general roadmap (warning: roadmap subject to change without notice):

• Improve editor role management

  Right now, users are either editors or managers. We recognize that some groups will need more control over what roles are available and what each allows, so we’ll be addressing that soon.

• Make acts_as_versioned and acts_as_tree optional

  I’m a big believer in both of these plugins, but given the state of plugin dependency management for Rails, relying on them is just asking for trouble. We haven’t decided how best to make them optional, but optional they shall be.

• Use liquid for page templates

  Right now page templates are straight ERb. That makes them both powerful and dangerous - and potentially intimidating to non-coders. Liquid’s a much better option, we think.

• Improve deployment integration to preserve generated content across releases

  Right now, we have to manually add the symlinks to our generated page and page template directories to preserve them across Capistrano deployments. It’d be nice to have that taken care of automatically.

• Use custom rake tasks to add-on new functionality

  This one’s cool. There’s a fair number of optional features we’d like to provide with Sandstone. Our vision for activating them is to use custom rake tasks. If you wanted to switch over to unobtrusive Javascript, for instance, you might just run rake sandstone:ujs:activate. Here’s some of the functionality we’re considering offering this for

  • versioning (after AAV is made optional)
  • hierarchical content (after AAT is made optional)
  • unobtrusive Javascript with Low Pro
  • alternatives to filesystem caching
  • integration with other resourceful plugins

  This is a strategy we’re using with other resourceful plugins, as well (but more on that another day).

• Provide alternatives to filesystem caching

  This one isn’t very high on the list, but it’s something we are thinking about.

• Refactor existing code to improve the design

  Always important, no?

• Manage content on dynamic pages

  This one’s the holy grail, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not talking about adding snippets of content to a page - I’m talking about being able to work with any content on a normal dynamic page, working around the code itself. I haven’t seen a really good solution for this anywhere, and I think we have a good approach in mind for it.

That just about does it for the Sandstone preview. Is there anything that any of you would really like to see in a CMS of this sort? Let me know in the comments!

Next time: we want YOUR help!