Uh, we skipped a few release announcements, but it's because...

Development on Awestruct is picking up now that the Arquillian team has started hacking on it for their new project site. They've contributed some improvements to Awestruct and have some other extensions waiting in the wings for a future release. There's also been a lot of chatter about Awestruct recently on twitter.

Here's a taste of the treats in store for you.

Aslak improved the Posts extension to read page.date as a alternative to the post filename, part of the preparation for a feature that enables automatic generation of blog entries for project releases (like this one!).

Aslak also integrated FSSM to monitor files more efficiently in development mode. Your CPU will thank you! He also committed a fix for a divide by 0 bug in the tagger extension that would strike when you least expected it. Additionally, he added support for extensions to define their own transformers.

At Dan's request, Awestruct has been upgraded to Compass 0.11.5 to take advantage of all the latest CSS3 mixins and so the online Compass documentation is actually relevant for developers using Awestruct. If you've been using a lot of the CSS3 mixins already, you may need to do a little migration. Compass spits out deprecation warnings to the console. Holler if the upgrade breaks your stylesheet and you aren't sure how to fix it.

Dan and Aslak figured out how to hack RedCloth to provide custom inline and block markup. The hooks are now in place. We'll be documenting how to make use of them soon. You can see an example here.

Dan documented the Disqus extension, an extension which snuck into a previous release without much ado. He also added an option to have the extension generate the Disqus identifier automatically from the date and slug of the post. Disqus is an alternative JavaScript-based comment system for Awestruct Posts which offers a very elegant interface for both users and administrators.

Finally, Tom's gsub transformer finally got merged in, so you can slice and dice the pages as they exit the pipeline.

Anyhow, check out gem.

gem install awestruct

If I missed something, feel free to mention it in the comments.

Photo Credit: ralph and jenny

Thanks to recent interest from Torsten Curdt, Emmanuel Bernard and others in the community, activity around Awestruct has increased as of late.

Emmanuel gives us the Flattr extension, plus a really nice blog post.

Torsten gives us RDiscount for Markdown instead of Bluecloth. Holler if it breaks your stuff.

Anyhow, check out v0.2.2.

gem install awestruct

I've just pushed the 0.1.1 version of the Awestruct gem to RubyGems.

This release brings about quite a few new extensions (see sidebar), plus the ability to base many sites of the same skin, including pipelines, pages and layouts.