Rangitaki Version 1.4

2016-05-08

523 words, ~4min reading time

Yesterday I released Rangitaki version 1.4 with the following new features and
fixes:

• Three new scripts in the bin folder to simplify the maintenance and setup. Read more below.
• Rangitaki API for working with your Rangitaki installation from other apps. Read on how to use the API in the documentation
• SASS and CoffeeScript capabilities for writing extensions and themes. These files are compiled and minimized using Gulp.
• Open links in articles in a new tab.
• Switch to YAML as language for the configuration. Rangitaki 1.4 and above cannot be used without a setup YAML configuration file at config.yaml. Read more below.
• Fix: Atom feeds didn't contain any text

Scripts

One of the main goals of Rangitaki is that anyone able to run a webserver should be able to easily install it. Because time you waste installing and configuring your blogging engine is time you don't have to write articles or do other stuff.

With version 1.4, Rangitaki made another step into this direction. It provides three PHP scripts. One for switch from the old and no longer supported config.php to the YAML config file and two for maintaining and setting Rangitaki and the RCC up.

The scripts are located in the bin\ directory and can only run from the root directory of your Rangitaki installation (not the system root). You can run them with php bin/thescript.php. This requires, that the php-cli package (or whatever name it has in your distribution) is installed on your installation. If you can't install any software on the server which is hosting your Rangitaki blog, you can still run these scripts on your home computer or in a virtual machine running Linux.

Switching config files.

bin/config.php is just there in 1.4 and will be removed in the next version. It's purpose is to switch from the old PHP config file (config.php) to the YAML config file used in Rangitaki 1.4 and above. Read more about this in the next paragraph.

Initializing Rangitaki

bin/init.php is actually more than a script. It's a handy tool for initializing your fresh Rangitaki installation since it guides you through setting all the config values and also for changing your existing configuration, if you don't want to edit the config.yaml directly.

Initializing the RCC and the API

bin/init_rcc.php is used for initializing the Rangitaki Control Center (RCC) and the API. It is separated from the init script since the user needs to provide a password and a username for the RCC and the API and not all users want to use these online tools.

Configuration file switch

I decided to switch from PHP to YAML as a language for the configuration, since PHP is pretty much non-human-readable and also quite limited if more variables are added. So I decided to use YAML because it is very readable for everyone since it doesn't contain any freakin' parentheses, colons or other stuff.

I didn't test it seriously but it didn't seem to take longer to parse the YAML compared then including the PHP file.

The YAML configuration file must be used with Rangitaki 1.4 and above. The old config.php does not work any longer. For switching you can use the script in bin/config.php which does the complete job for you. On how to use the script read the paragraph above.

Version Control System

Before you freak out. NO, Rangitaki does not contain a VCS and will never include one. This is about where Rangitaki is developed. I moved from GitHub (over git.mmk2410.org and over phab.mmk2410.org) to mmk2410.org / marcel-kapfer.de.

The main reason for doing that was and still is, that I think it's crazy to develop free (as in freedom, not as in free beer) on a proprietary platform.

Updating

As always I provide you an update script for easily switch from Rangitaki 1.3.0 to Rangitaki 1.4.0: https://gitlab.com/mmk2410/rangitaki/raw/stable/update-scripts/1-3-0_1-4-0.sh

Happy Blogging!