v1.0.0 Beta 8

[paulrobertlloyd]

Indiekit’s first beta release of 2024 is a fairly substantial one. Largely focused on post type configuration, it contains a breaking change in this area.

It also improves the onboarding experience and documentation, and includes a number of bug fixes.

I expect there may be some bumps in the road with the introduction of post type plug-ins, but hopefully we can iron those out pretty quickly! Use this discussion thread to let me know if you’ve run into any issues, or have questions about this release.

🚨 BREAKING CHANGES

Post type configuration

To aid the introduction of post type plug-ins, post type configuration has changed. You can read more about the decision in this ADR, but in short, Indiekit now expects a keyed collection of objects instead of an array:

// Before
postTypes: [
  {
    type: "note",
    post: {
      path: "notes/{yyyy}-{MM}-{dd}-{slug}.markdown",
      url: "notes/{yyyy}/{DDD}/a{n}/{slug}/",
    }
  }
]

// After
postTypes: {
  note: {
     post: {
       path: "notes/{yyyy}-{MM}-{dd}-{slug}.markdown",
       url: "notes/{yyyy}/{DDD}/a{n}/{slug}/",
     }
   }
}

Presets

If you are using the Hugo or Jekyll presets, there may be some slight changes in output, as post templates now output all provided properties (except those prefixed with mp-*). However, in most cases there should be no difference.

In addition, in order to better conform with Jekyll’s preference for front matter keys, these now use snake_case instead of kebab-case:

---
date: 2024-03-03
- like-of: https://getindiekit.com
+ like_of: https://getindiekit.com
---

(That Eleventy tends to favour camelCase for its properties might be the nudge I need to create a specific preset for that static generator.)

New features

🔌 Post type plugins

Turns out that publication presets were doing a lot of heavy lifting, and dictating more of the publishing pipeline than I intended. In fact, a number of assumptions around post types had been baked into various different parts of the application.

Post type plug-ins attempt to abstract a lot of this behaviour, and in doing so, make this aspect of Indiekit more customisable. They allow plug-in authors to:

• Determine a post type’s name
• Dictate which properties a post type has (and which are required)
• Provide means of creating and editing properties in Indiekit’s interface, and validate fields before form submission

These features are available via the new Indiekit.addPostType API.

In addition to adapting the existing post-types into plug-ins (for which article, bookmark, like, note, photo and reply are installed by default), 2 new post types have been added:

1. @indiekit/post-type-event allows you to add event posts to your website.
2. @indiekit/post-type-jam enables posting music you are currently listening to.

🔢 Character count

The content field in the editing interface now includes a character and word count. This follows a similar design to that used by the GOV.UK design system, that includes a delay before announcing updated counts to screen reader users. (#697)

🇸🇪 Swedish localisation

Thanks to @carlrafting for translating Indiekit into Swedish, bringing the number of available localisations up to 12.

Improvements and bug fixes

First run

• npm create indiekit would incorrectly report the minimum supported Node version, this has now been fixed. Thanks to @jphastings for reporting (npm create indiekit fails at URL.canParse(value) #674).
• Any issues discovered while creating a MongoDB connection or connecting to a database are now reported in the interface. Thanks to @jackdbd for reporting and suggesting a fix (Immediately notify the user about connection issues with MongoDB #690).
• The MongoDB database name can now be configured in the connection string. Thanks to @jphastings for reporting (Offer MongoURL guidance in options #681).

Publishing

• Indiekit will now fetch references for form-encoded Micropub requests. Thanks to @aciccarello for reporting (enrichPostData doesn't work with form encoded data #671).
• Indiekit will no longer throw an error when generating a JF2 feed. Thanks to @aciccarello for reporting (Crash in feed controller #676).
• Indiekit will now accept a publish date in form-encoded Micropub requests. Thanks to @jackdbd for reporting (RangeError: Invalid time zone specified: Europe/Rome when posting notes from IndiePass #691).

Documentation

• API documentation now follows a format that is closer to that used on MDN (Update plug-in API docs to follow MDN format #699).
• Sections around configuration have been reorganised and expanded (Update documentation for configuration, including post types #701).

Thanks to feedback from @kwaa and @davepeck in this area (#652).

Plug-ins

• Plug-in authors no longer need to provide id or meta properties on the plug-in constructor (Remove need for plugins to supply import.meta #698).

Chores

• Replaced AVA with Node.js test runner
• Replaced C8 with Node.js test coverage reporter

---

This discussion was created from the release v1.0.0 Beta 8.

[paulrobertlloyd]

Spotted an issue where Indiekit throws an error and restarts the server when the image endpoint needs to resize an image. Investigating.